Definition of Open Access

26e Colloque annuel de l’Association des administratrices et des administrateurs de recherche universitaire du Québec (ADARUQ) Château Laurier, Québec 19 novembre 2009

« Accès libre et auto-archivage : carnet de bord de bonnes pratiques »

Cet atelier porta sur la problématique de l'accès libre à la documentation scientifique sous format numérique. Y furent présentés l'historique de l'accès libre, les concepts qui le délimitent ainsi que les outils mis à la disposition de la communauté de recherche afin de rendre publics les résultats de la recherche subventionnée. Stevan Harnad, titulaire de la Chaire de recherche du Canada en sciences cognitives à l'UQAM, présenta ce portrait détaillé.

Tanja Niemann, ÉRUDIT, et Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Professeur, UDEM, SYNERGIES de l'Université de Montréal présentèrent ces deux plateformes d'accès libre, instaurées grâce au soutien financier des fonds québécois et de la Fondation canadienne pour l'innovation (FCI).

Comment un établissement de recherche peut-il par ailleurs établir une archive institutionnelle de publications numériques ? L'expérience d'Archipel, l'Archive de publications électroniques de l'UQAM, fut relatée par Magada Fusaro, titulaire de la Chaire Unesco-Bell en communication et développement international et présidente-fondatrice du Comité institutionnel sur l'auto-archivage qui a supervisé les travaux préliminaires au lancement d'Archipel, ainsi que par Marc Couture, Professeur à la TÉLUQ.

Modératrice et responsable : Dominique Michaud, UQAM

Participants :

Stevan Harnad, Professeur, UQAM Chronique du Libre Accès
Tanja Niemann, ÉRUDIT
Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Professeur, UDEM, SYNERGIES
Magda Fusaro, Professeure, UQAM
Marc Couture, Professeur, TELUQ

Access 2009 Program
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

Thursday, October 1st

8:30 9:30 Opening Keynote: Copyright vs Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: The State of Play in the Global Copyfight
Cory Doctorow

9:30 10:15
David Binkley Lecture: Will We Command Our Data?
Richard Akerman

10:45 11:30 Session: COPPUL's LOCKSS Private Network / Software Lifecycles & Sustainability: a PKP and reSearcher Update
Mark Jordan & Brian Owen

1:00 1:45 Session: Chudnovian Stuff
Dan Chudnov

1:45 2:30 Session: IslandLives: A Flexible Digital Repository Framework
Donald Moses & Paul Pound

2:30 3:15 Session: Grasping What is Already Within Immediate Reach: Universal Open Access Mandates Video Part I -- Video Part II
Stevan Harnad

3:45 4:30 Session: ILS in the Sky with Diamonds / OS ILS Roy Tennant & Mike Rylander

Friday, October 2nd

8:30 9:15 Session: Infinite Malleability: Porting What We've Learned From the Digital World into Real Life
Peter Rukavina

9:15 10:00 Session: Drupal In Libraries
Cary Gordon

1:00 1:45 Session: Representing and Managing the Data Deluge
Dorothea Salo

1:45 2:30 Session: Inspecting the Elephant: Characterizing the Hathi Trust Collection
Roy Tennant

2:30 3:15 Session: Next Gen OPACs
Bess Sadler + Jon Jiras

3:45 4:30 Session: Mobile Apps: USask iPhone Application / Mobile Discovery Application
Andrew Nagy & Heather Tones White

Saturday, October 3rd

8:30 9:15 Session: Virtual Research Environment - 2 Years Later
Mark Leggott

9:15 10:30
Session: The Portal to Texas History
Cathy Hartman/Mark Phillips

11:00 12:00 Session: Zotero: A better way to go?
Gwendolyn MacNairn

12:00 1:00 Closing Keynote: Hacking as a Way of Knowing
William J. Turkel

KG: "I do not think that using the request button is a valid OA strategy. My own experience was that I received few response when requesting an article. The St. Gallen IR manager said that requesters can obtain much more positive results when mailing to the scholar directly."

(1) Michael White reported that the response rates for the email eprint request button at U. Stirling are about 50% fulfillment, 5% refusal and 45% no response.

(2) He also said that some of the no-responses may have been (2a) elapsed email addresses, (2b) temporary absence, (2c) embargoed theses, and (2d) author unfamiliarity with the purpose and use of the email eprint request Button.

(3) He also noted that the response rates may well improve with time. (I would add that that's virtually certain: It is still exceedingly early days for the Button. And time -- as well as the growing clamor for access [and impact] -- is on the Button's side.)

(4) It is harder to imagine why and how the long and complicated (and obsolescent) alternative procedure -- of a user discovering an article that has not been deposited by the author, finding the author's email address, and sending him an email eprint request, to which the author must respond by sending an email and attaching the eprint -- would "obtain much more positive results" than the author depositing the article in his IR, once, and letting the IR's Button send the email requests for the requesters to the author with no need for look-up, and only one click needed from the author to fulfill the request.

(5) The email eprint request Button does not provide OA; it only provides "Almost OA." But that's infinitely better than no OA. And the Button (and the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access -- ID/OA -- Mandate, for which the Button was designed) make it possible for institutions and funders to adopt Green OA mandates that neither need to allow exemptions from immediate deposit nor do they need to allow publishers to dictate whether or when the deposit is made.

(If publishers have a say, it is only about whether and when the deposit is made OA, not about whether or when the deposit is made at all. Since 63% of journals are already Green on immediate OA, the ID/OA Button means that an institution or funder can reach uncontroversial consensus on requiring 100% deposit, which then yields at least 63% immediate OA and 37% Almost-OA, whereas the alternative is not arriving at a consensus on mandating OA at all, or adopting a weaker mandate that only provides OA after an embargo period, or only at the publisher's behest, or allows author opt-out. And the most important thing is not only that the ID/OA provides more access and is easier to reach agreement on adopting, but it will also quite naturally drive embargoes into their well-deserved graves, as the mandates and their resulting OA -- and the demand for it -- grow and grow.)

KG: "The Oppenheim/Harnad "preprint & corrigenda" strategy "of tiding over a publisher's OA embargo: Make the unrefereed preprint OA before submitting to the journal, and if upon acceptance the journal seeks to embargo OA to the refereed postprint, instead update the OA preprint with a corrigenda file" is a valid OA strategy because the eprint is PUBLIC."

What makes a strategy "valid" is that it works: increases access, Open Access, and Open Access mandates.

Both the "preprint&corrigenda" strategy and the "ID/OA-mandate&Button" strategy can increase access, OA, and OA mandates, but the ID/OA-mandate&Button strategy is universal: it scales up to cover all of OA's target content, whereas the preprint&corrigenda strategy is not universal, for it does not and cannot cover those disciplines (and individual authors) that have good (and bad) reasons not to want to make their unrefereed preprints public.

KG: "If an article is published then the author hasn't any right under OA aspects to choose which requester has enough "dignity" to receive an eprint. I cannot accept the arbitrariness of such a decision under OA circumstances."

Relax. The reason neophyte self-archiving authors are not fulfilling Button requests is because they are either not receiving them or don't yet understand what to do with them, not because they are making value judgments about who does and does not merit the privilege of accessing their work!

They'll learn: If necessary, they'll learn under the pressure of the impact-weighting of publications in performance evaluation. But my hunch is that they already know they want the user-access and user-impact (from the eager way they do vanity-searches in the biobliography of every work they pick up in their research field, to check whether their own work has been cited). So all they really need to learn now is how the Button works, and why.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège, in
collaboration with Dr. Alma Swan of Key Perspectives and University of
Southampton, has just launched EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship):

EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is a membership organisation for universities and research institutions. The organisation is a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings.

The context for the establishment of the EOS forum has been:

• the findings of the ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of Scientific Publications Markets in Europe’ (European Commission, DG Research, project report, January 2006)

• the subsequent major conference in Brussels in February 2007 held jointly by the European Commission’s DG Research and DG Information and Media, ‘Scientific Publishing in the Digital Age’

• the outstanding success of the research community’s petition on Open Access to Scientific Information to the European Commissioner for Research (summary of petition and its presentation)

• the recommendations on Open Access of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB)

• the mandatory policy on Open Access to research it funds under the Seventh Framework Programme from the European Research Council

• the European University Association recommendations on Open Access adopted by the EUA Council in March 2008

Our first meeting was held at the University of Liege on 18 October 2007 (The Liege Convention). We reconvened at the University of Southampton on 4 April 2008 during the Open Repositories 08 (OR08) conference. Our next general meeting will be in Geneva in June 2009.

This website will report on developments of relevance to the mission of EnablingOpenScholarship and will provide members with news and details of forthcoming meetings, briefings and discussion sessions.

Anyone who is interested in enrolling their institution as a member, or in attending an EOS meeting or briefing session, is invited to email the convenor of the group, Dr Alma Swan (contact details).

Matthias Spielkamp [MS] has just participated in an International Copyright Conference in Berlin (May 7-8) and is participating in a radio debate on open access today (May 9). MS has cast some revealing new light on the original source of Roland Reuss's animus against Open Access (OA) in the Heidelberg Appeal, which Reuss co-drafted. (The following exchange with me [SH] is posted with MS's permission.)

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SH: The Heidelberger Appell is all based on pure misunderstanding.

MS: It is indeed. Reuss is not talking about journal articles. He says he is not even talking about OA. He says that he "does not want to be forced to publish" his works (classics editions, in his case) [books] in any form other than what he chooses himself. Why does he say that? Because he apparently had the experience that one of his funders demanded that a classic edition he was going to publish in cooperation with a mid-size book-publisher be made OA a year after publication. The publisher said he would not produce the book under these circumstances.

SH: Matthias, first, thanks so much for at last discovering and revealing the original source of the misunderstanding!

Second, it is still Reuss's fault, for having immediately launched a petition that made this scattershot attack on all forms of free online access without taking the trouble to see and separate what is benign and desirable from what is not (and what is and is not OA's target).

Third, it sounds as if the fault here lies also partly with the research funder. I will state it very bluntly: At a time when (Green) OA for OA's primary target content -- refereed journal articles -- is still not yet mandated by most institutions and funders, hence articles are not being made OA, even though they are all, without exception, author give-aways, published solely for research impact, there is no excuse for (or sense in) research funders targeting books instead, for being made OA.

Books are a far more complicated, far less uniform, and far less urgent case insofar as OA is concerned. Not all (nor even most) book authors want to give their books away free online today. Nor is it yet apparent whether there is a viable, sustainable economic model for book publication if it turns out (as it might -- the evidence is far from clear yet) that book cost-recovery is not viable if the book is made free online (at least not for book publication that still generates a printed book too). A funder that arbitrarily insists on book OA today -- when what is unambiguously and urgently needed is journal article OA -- has no more clearly thought through the meaning and priorities of OA than Reuss did, and this should be clearly and fairly stated too.

(Note that it is not that I am at all against book OA, by the way. I actually believe it is already the right solution today for esoteric scholarly and scientific monographs that have difficulty finding a publisher, and for which the only edition will be the online edition. I also think that for some -- though not all -- print books, a free online version may not hurt -- and may perhaps even help -- sales of the print edition. But there is still a lot of testing and evidence needed before authors and publishers can be confident of that. And last, I think that the power and potential of making journal-articles OA will encourage more scholars and scientists to report their important findings rapidly, via journal articles, and to make those articles [Green] OA. What later becomes of their elaborations and syntheses in the form of books is a far less urgent matter for research progress at this time.)

MS: The "Heidelberger Appell" gives the impression that it's talking about OA, when it is not. Reuss is not at all interested in journal publishing. He is talking about books, about being "the author" whose autonomy must not, under any circumstances, be subjected to any conditions made by the funder. It may be feudalistic (I think it is) but it is understandable if it renders impossible a project of his. It's not about royalties, it's about models that rely on multiple-volume book subscriptions where a publisher wants to recoup his investments. Some of them don't even make a profit; we're not talking about Springer / Wiley / Elsevier here.

SH: I agree. And the right thing to do is to make it crystal clear when one is talking only about books, and not about journal articles, nor OA nor OA mandates. This is what Reuss has not done, but rather the contrary.

Funders and institutions too, for their part, must make it crystal clear that OA's primary target is refereed journal (and conference) articles, and that those are the only targets of Green OA self-archiving mandates.

MS: The problem is that everyone (including myself) read his Appell as an attack on open acces. Was this the biggest mistake of all? I don't think so, because politicians perceive it the same way so, a riposte was appropriate.

SH: The mistake was definitely Reuss's, for not specifying his target. (Both Reuss, in his "Con Crema (Open Access als Enteignung)" and his fellow-author Uwe Jochum ("Open Access gepusht") write very specifically against "Open Access" in the side-bar of the Heidelberg Appeal.) But it is partly also the fault of the German research institutions and research funders, for falling behind the rest of the world, in not mandating Green OA self-archiving of journal articles (and even trying awkwardly and idiosyncratically to insist on OA for a few books, which no institution or funder elsewhere has done).

If the “Alliance of German Scientific Organisations” had done as other funders and institutions worldwide are doing or preparing to do, which is to unambiguously identify OA's target content -- refereed journal articles -- and to mandate that they be self-archived to make them OA (as Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has more-or-less done), then this systematic misunderstanding and confusion would not have been possible.

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(1a) Book and newspaper article authors. There are creators of digital content intended for sale who are afraid that all the rampant piracy might mean a risk to their livelihood. To a certain extent they may be right. No one knows yet whether all the free availability of books and newspaper articles  will make it harder for their authors to make a living. Some say books sell better if they are freely available online, others say the opposite, and no one knows yet for sure (and it may vary from book to book). Something similar might be true of newspaper articles, in either direction.

(1b) Book and newspaper article publishers. In addition to the creators of the book and newspaper content (book authors and journalists), the publishers of books and newspapers -- their interests completely aligned with those of their authors -- ask the same questions and have the same worries; and these worries may likewise have some validity. No one knows yet for sure.

(The same as the above can be said for both the creators and the publishers of music, video and software content.)

(2a) Peer-reviewed journal article authors. But there is also a completely different kind of content, whose creators do not make their living by selling it: on the contrary, their salaries and careers depend on how much their writings are read, used, applied, built-upon and cited. These are researchers -- scholars and scientists in all disciplines, when they are not publishing books but peer-reviewed journal articles. They do not write for royalties or fees; they write for the sake of maximal uptake, usage and impact of their research fundings. They are employed by their universities and research institutions, and funded by their research funders, to do research with maximal impact on the productivity and progress of research itself. They in fact have the opposite worry from the worries of the writers in (1a) above: They want to make their writings freely available to one and all online, but many of them are afraid to do it, because they are afraid it may be illegal, as in (1a) and that their publishers will sue them or refuse to publish their writing if they make it freely accessible online.

(2b) Peer-reviewed journal article publishers. In fact, these authors are wrong: the majority of the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals, across all disciplines and languages have already given their authors of their published articles the formal green light to make their final, peer-reviewed drafts freely accessible online, either immediately upon acceptance for publication (63%) or after embargo periods of various lengths (a further 34%). So less than 3% of journals have not yet endorsed their authors' right to make their final draft freely accessible online in some form or other.

It is true, however, that although most of the publishers of these journals (2b) have endorsed making it freely accessible online, most authors do not yet do it -- partly because they don't know that they can, and partly because they are not sure how or why to do it. Meanwhile, research impact continues to be lost, daily, because access to peer-reviewed research is mostly still restricted to those researchers whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which the research appeared. And no institution can afford to subscribe to all, most, or even many of the 25,000 peer-reviewed journals: only a small fraction of them. This means that many researchers cannot access research that they would otherwise use, which in turn means that those articles are losing their potential research impact. We know this, because in studies in field after field, comparing articles in the same journal and year that have and have not been made free online ("Open Access" OA), we find without exception that the OA articles are cited substantially more.

Now here is the heart of the profound misunderstanding pervading the Heidelberg Declaration: It treats the authors and writing in (1a) and (2a) as if their interests were the same, whereas they could not be more different! (1a) are non-give-away authors, writing for income; for them, users who access their work without paying are a potential loss to their livelihood (because of loss of royalty income). (2a) are give-away authors, writing for impact, and users who cannot access their work because they cannot afford to pay are a potential loss to their livelihood (because of loss of research impact).

The Heidelberg Appeal has completely conflated (1a) and (2a) and insists on treating it all as (1a). And it must be said that they are aided and abetted in this by some publishers in (2a), who include those who have not endorsed authors making their articles OA as well as those who have endorsed it for public relations purposes, recognizing the benefits of OA for research but without wishing to see it prevail: So they adopt a "green" policy, endorsing their authors making their articles OA, but they lobby vigorously against research funders and institutions adopting policies that require their employees or fundees to make their articles OA (Green OA self-archiving mandates).

And that is the reason peer-reviewed journal articles (2a) -- even though they are all, without a single exception, author give-aways -- are treated exactly as if they were revenue-seeking publications, exactly the way most books, newspaper articles, music, video and software (1a): Because for publishers, they are revenue-seeking in both cases!

Hence there is an author/publisher conflict of interest in (2), in contrast to the congruence of interest in (1). There is a natural way to resolve this author/publisher conflict of interest, and it certainly is not -- as the Heidelberg Appeal would entail -- to treat research as if it too were revenue-seeking writing, to the detriment of research progress and impact: 

The remedy is universal Green OA mandates, adopted by all research institutions and funders. Currently, institutional subscriptions are paying all the costs of journal publication. If universal OA ever makes journal subscriptions unsustainable, then journals can convert to the Gold OA model, with the institutions paying for the publication costs of their research article output by the individual article, out of their windfall journal subscription cancellation savings.

What must on no account be allowed to happen is for research progress and impact to be sacrificed in order to protect publishers from the risk of an eventual transition to Gold OA, or to force institutions to pay for Gold OA now, when subscriptions are still paying the bill (and at a price that will almost certainly diminish under the cancellation and cost-cutting pressure of universal Green OA).

The Heidelberg Appeal also does its share of conflating Green OA self-archiving and Gold OA publishing, which of course blurs the picture even further, and adds even more to the confusion. But it must be said that the Green/Gold confusion is alas far more widespread than just the minds of the drafters of the Heidelberg Appeal.

Some journal-article authors are paying for Gold OA publishing today, in which the author (or author's institution or funder) pays for publication and the user has free access online, but this is done voluntarily by authors (or their institutions of funders); it is not imposed on them. No one is proposing to impose it on them. It is rare. And, most important, it is not necessary in order to provide OA. Subscriptions are already paying the full costs of publication today. Green OA self-archiving is sufficient to provide OA, and it costs nothing to the author or the author's institution or funder.

But what the drafters and signatories of the Heidelberg Declaration ought to ask themselves is this: If the problem is consumer piracy, depriving authors of their revenue through free (and illegal) online access, why are these particular authors paying to make their articles freely accessible online instead of worrying about unpaid access like the authors of books? 

The answer, of course, is that research is not published for royalty income but for research impact, and OA maximizes research impact. And this is so important to this very distinct category of authors -- the authors of the 2.5 million articles a year published in the planets 25,000 peer reviewed journals -- that far from worrying about not "profiting therefrom," some authors are even willing to go so far as to pay (needlessly) to make their articles freely accessible to all users.

This fact should already ring a bell clearly to signal the fact that not all articles and all writings can be treated on the model of authors seeking profit from paid access.

And the reason it is not necessary to pay for Gold OA publishing today is that Green OA self-archiving can be mandated by the funders and institutions of the researchers. These mandates are steadily growing, and that is the real reason why some journal publishers are trying to make a common cause with book authors and book publishers, against both book piracy and OA, under the pretext of protecting authors' rights, even though in reality this goes against the interests of journal article authors as well as research itself.

Newspaper publishers and newspaper article authors are facing a problem similar to the one faced by book authors and publishers. But in this respect book and newspaper-article authors and publishers are again alike, yet they all continue to be profoundly unlike the authors of peer-reviewed journal articles, who are not facing a threat from the possibility of free online access, but an enormous and unprecedented opportunity to maximize the access and impact of their research, to the benefit of research itself, its institutions and funders, and the public for whose benefit and with whose funds much research is done.

Books are indeed being made freely accessible online, often without regard to copyright and the interests of the authors; but research journal articles are being made OA by their authors, under OA mandates from their institutions and funders, and mostly with the endorsement of their publishers (with almost-OA solutions that have almost the same effect for the minority of exceptions, without violating copyright).

Most importantly, only non-give-away book and newspaper-article authors are interested in using copyright to restrict access to their work to those who pay: give-away journal article authors do not.

German research organizations do want to accelerate this process: That is what Green OA self-archiving mandates are for. But this applies only to give-away research articles, not to the none-give-away content with which this is all being hopelessly (and partly deliberately) conflated and confused by the drafters of the Heidelberg Appeal.

Free access is definitely not all seen in the same way by literary, artistic and scientific authors. User piracy of authors' books is very different from author give-away of their own journal articles. The authors of research journal articles see free online access to their writings very, very differently from the authors of books, for reasons that should by now be evident.

Those who are calling for "Freedom of Publication and the Safe-Guarding of Authors' Rights" are book authors and book and journal publishers, not the authors of research journal articles.  Moreover, there is absolutely no "freedom of publication" issue at all, for anyone, book-authors or article-authors. That is a pure red herring.  As noted, research journal authors are not interested in using copyright to prevent free online access; they are interested in providing free online access, to maximize the impact of their research

To put the few signatories of the Heidelberg Appeal against OA into context, one should compare it with the tens of thousands of researchers who are signing the petition for the EC to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

The preamble to MS's radio debate asks:

[Werden] bestimmen statt der Lektoren künftig die anonymen Betreiber von Webservern, was publiziert wird und was nicht? 

No, for peer-reviewed research, OA does not mean that "anonymous website administrators" will decide what is and is not published: The peer-reviewers (and journal editors) will continue to decide -- indeed that is what peer-reviewed research publication is (and the peers review for free). Publishers will continue to administer the peer-review process, and as long as subscriptions are sustainable, subscriptions will pay the costs of that. If ever they are cancelled because of OA, then the self-same cancellation savings will be used to pay publishers for the administration of peer review.

None of this has anything to do with books or newspaper articles.

Verliert, was kostenlos zu beziehen ist, nicht zugleich auch seinen Wert? 

No, the fact that peer-reviewed research is freely accessible in no way entails that it has lost its value -- on the contrary, it has maximized the impact of that same value. (What are these silly slogans?)

Wie wertvoll ist uns noch das gedruckte Wort?

The value of (and market for) the analog vs digital versions of works is an entirely different matter and unrelated to the special case of peer-reviewed journal articles (except to note that as long as there is genuine need and demand for the print edition, the subscription model is safe!).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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      Deutsche Übersetzung von Ben Kaden

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Professor Eberhard Hilf has noted that the drafter of the Heidelberg Appeal (a double-barrelled petition directed indifferently both against google book-scanning and against providing Open Access to research journal articles in Germany), Professor Roland Reuss, himself provides open access to his own journal articles:

EH: "Just to add: Mr. Reuss, in his role as Professor of history, has of course posted digital copies of all his scholarly articles on his institutional server (with a link to the publisher for ordering a printed copy if wished).

"This is Kafkaesque: Lying on one's back, one says, just as the lobbyists do, that OA is the "devils' gift," whereas standing on one's feet as a scholar, one provides OA!

"By the way, Reuss's research field is Kafka."

What has happened, is that Professor Reiss has made two fundamental confusions: He has confused (1) Open Access (which concerns journal articles) with google book-scanning, and he has confused (2) author-intended give-aways with author-unintended rip-offs.

It is quite astonishing that a scholar rushes to draft a petition rather than first gathering a clear understanding of what he is petitioning about.

To paraphrase Professor Hilf (who puts it in his own colorful way), this is the downside of the internet (if not also of the scholarly intellect), which can do so much good when used in a rational, rigorous way, and so much harm when used wrecklessly and unreflectively.

Below is a clause by clause critique of Professor Reuss's Heidelberg Appeal.

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THE FREEDOM TO PUBLISH AND THE PROTECTION OF COPYRIGHT

(a petition launched in Germany by Roland Reuss, U. Heidelberg)

"Currently the fundamental right of authors vouched for in the constitution to publish freely and of their own volition is under considerable attack and sustained threat."

This blanket statement about “authors” in general completely conflates (1) legitimate worries about consumer piracy of authors’ non-giveaway writings (such as books written for royalty) with (2) the author give-away of peer-reviewed research journal articles, which is what the Open Access movement is about.

Nor are authors’ rights to publish whatever they wish, wherever they wish, in any way under attack, or at issue.

"At the international level, intellectual property is being stolen from its producers to an unimagined degree and without criminalisation through the illegal publication of works protected by German copyright law on platforms such as GoogleBooks and YouTube. "

This refers to consumer piracy of authors’ non-give-away writings, a subject of legitimate concern, but completely unrelated to the movement for Open Access to researchers’ give-away journal articles”

"At national level, the so-called “Alliance of German Scientific Organisations” (members: Wissenschaftsrat, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Leibniz-Gesellschaft, Max Planck-Institute etc.) is propagandising for wide-ranging interference with the freedom of the press and the freedom to publish, the consequences of which are contrary to the basic law."

This refers to the efforts by these institutions to make peer-reviewed research journal articles Open Access – freely accessible online -- so that they can be read, used, applied and cited by all would-be users and not just by those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published. This is all author give-away writing, for which the author does not seek or get (and never has sought or gotten) a penny of royalty from sales revenue; the author seeks only maximal uptake and impact. Freedom of the press and freedom to publish are in no respect at issue here.

"Authors and publishers reject all attempts to, and practices that, undermine copyright. That copyright is fundamental for literature, art and science, for the basic right to freedom of research and teaching, as well as for press freedom and the freedom to publish. In the future too, it must be writers, artists, scientists, in brief, all creative people themselves, who decide if and where their works should be published. Any constraint or coercion to publish in a certain form is as unacceptable as the political toleration of pirate copies, currently being produced in huge numbers by Google."

Authors are free to publish whatever they wish, wherever they wish. And no one is undermining copyright, particularly for non-give-away, royalty-seeking work (such as most books, and journalists’ fee-based articles), where the author’s copyright penalizes piracy.

But not all authors seek to sell their writing for royalty or fees. The 2.5 million articles a year published in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals (in all disciplines, countries and languages) are all creator give-aways, written solely for uptake and usage in further research. Their authors want copyright to protect their authorship and the integrity of their texts (e.g., from plagiarism or alteration), but they want to give away their texts free online so that all would-be users can access and use them.

There is no constraint whatsoever on these give-away authors: They are not royalty-seeking book-authors, fee-based journalists, or other creators of digital works for sale.

The funders of the research (including the tax-paying public whose money is being used to pay for the conduct of the research) and the employers of the researchers (universities and research institutions, who pay their salaries) also share these give-away authors' interest in maximizing the access and usage of their joint research output. “Publish or Perish” reflects the longstanding academic mandate (long predating the digital era) for scholars and scientists to conduct research and make public their findings, so they can be used and built upon, by other scholars and scientists, to the benefit of all, in the collective, cumulative growth of learned inquiry. These authors are already being rewarded, in their careers and their research support, for their research productivity as well as for the uptake and impact of their research findings. Open Access maximizes these.

It is for this reason that in the online era research funders and universities the world over – but not yet in Germany – are beginning to adopt policies that mandate that researchers provide Open Access to their (give-away) peer-reviewed research articles (not their [non-give-away] books!) by self-archiving them, free for all, on the web.

These Open Access mandates are needed not to force authors to give away their articles (they do that already, more than willingly) but to reinforce their inclination to make their give-away (published) articles freely accessible to all on the web.

This inclination needs reinforcement because some authors imagine that it is illegal for them to make their articles freely accessible online, others imagine that their journals will not allow it, and still others imagine that self-archiving entails a lot of work. The mandates formalize the fact that providing Open Access is legal, that at least 63% of journals already formally endorse authors making their articles Open Access immediately upon publication, and another 34% endorse it after a temporary embargo period (during which automatized email eprint requests can take care of immediate research usage needs) and that it takes only a few minutes to self-archive an article.

Dr. Reuss presumably knows all this, because he already self-archives his give-away articles to make them Open Access on the web too. He simply has not put two and two together, because he has conflated Open Access policies with google book-scanning and has not taken the trouble to do the research that would have made him realize that they are completely different things. Instead, he drafts this incoherent petition to treat both Open Access and google copyright issues as if they were the same sort of thing.

In contrast, international surveys of authors in all disciplines (humanities included) have repeatedly confirmed that 95% of authors would make their give-away journal articles OA (over 80% of them willingly) if their universities and/or funders were to mandate it. They need the mandates to give them the confidence and initiative to do it. And an appeal to the EC vastly larger than the Heidelberg Appeal has been signed by tens of thousands of researchers and their institutions petitioning the EC to mandate OA!

"Never in history has the number of publications, books, magazines and electronic publications been as large as it is today, and never has the freedom of decision of authors been guaranteed to such a high degree. The “Alliance of German Scientific Organisations” wants to obligate authors to use a specified mode of publication. This is not conducive to the improvement of scientific information."

The “mode of publication” is simply the mode of publication authors already use – publishing in the peer-reviewed journal of their choice – augmented by making the published article Open Access.

(In fairness, it must also be noted that there is some confusion among Open Access proponents too, about how they are advocating that articles be made Open Access. The “Green Road” to Open Access is for authors to publish their articles in the traditional journals of their choice, and then to make their peer-reviewed, accepted final drafts freely accessible online, by self-archiving them in their institution’s Open Access repository. The “Gold Road” to Open Access is for authors to publish their articles in an “Open Access journal,” which is a journal that makes all of its articles freely accessible online. The choice of journal, however, remains entirely up to the author. So what is being advocated is not a “mode of publication,” but a mode of access-provision – having published the article when and where the author chooses.)

Hence no one is proposing to constrain in any way authors’ choice in what to publish, when, where or how. Open Access mandates are concerned only with modes of maximizing access to the chosen mode of publication (and only for give-away peer-reviewed research articles).

"The undersigned appeal emphatically to the Federal Government and to the governments of the federal states for a resolute defence, with all the means at their disposal, of existing copyright and of the freedom to publish, to research and to teach. Politicians have the obligation to enforce, at national and international level, the individual rights and aspirations linked with the production of artistic and scientific works. The freedom of literature, art and science is a major constitutional asset. If we loose it, we loose our future."

Open Access is completely compatible with existing copyright. All it requires is that publishers should not try to deprive give-away authors of the right to make their give-away articles accessible online free for all, by self-archiving them, as Herr Reuss does. Why, then, is Herr Reuss petitioning against this author’s right under the confused banner of defending authors’ rights and freedom?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Yet another declaration/petition/statement/manifesto concerning OA has been drafted, this time not one full of pro-OA platitudes (like the Berlin Declaration) but of anti-OA canards and nonsequiturs: The Heidelberg Appeal ("Heidelberger Appel"), launched by the German text critic, Roland Reuss.

(These misunderstandings are intentional when promulgated by publishers lobbying against OA [e.g., the "DC Principles," the "Prism Coalition" and the "Brussels Declaration"] but not in the case of scholars waxing righteously indignant about their rights without first coming to a clear understanding of what is really at issue, as in the case of Herr Reuss.)

An article in the 2 May 2009 Zuercher Zeitung seems to catch and correct a few of the ambiguities and absurdities of Reuss's singularly wrong-headed argument, but far from all of them.

Someone still has to state, loud and clear (and in German!), that Herr Reuss (and the signatories he has managed to inspire to follow him in his failure to grasp what is actually at issue) is:

(1) conflating consumer piracy of authors' non-give-away texts (largely books) with author give-aways of their own journal articles (which is what Open Access is about);

(2) conflating Open Access with Google book scanning;

(3) conflating "Gratis" Open Access (free online access), which is what all the Green Open Access Self-Archiving and self-archiving mandates are, with "Libre" (free online access PLUS re-use rights), which only some Gold OA journals are providing, and again, in accordance with the wishes and agreement of the author.

The Humanities are more book-intensive than other disciplines, but insofar as their journal articles are concerned, they are no different: their authors write them (and give them away) for usage and impact, not royalty income.

So insofar as OA is concerned, the "Heidelberger Appell" is largely misunderstanding, nonsense and mischief, and I still hope this will be clearly exposed and put-paid-to in the German Press, otherwise it will continue to retard the progress of OA in Germany.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Here is the Quicktime Movie of:

"On the affinities and disaffinities among free software, peer-to-peer access, and open access to peer-reviewed research."

a talk by Stevan Harnad on March 26 at:

Free Software and Beyond: The World of Peer Production

the 4th Oekonux and P2P Foundation Conference. Manchester, UK, 27-29 March 2009.

SUMMARY: Free/Open Software (notably the first Free Software for creating OAI-compliant Open Access Institutional Repositories, EPrints, created in 2000, distributed under the GNU license, and now used worldwide) has been central to the growth of the Open Access Movement.
    However, there are also crucial distinctions that need to be made and understood, among the movements for (1) Free/Open source software, (2) Open Access (to peer-reviewed research), (3) P2P file-sharing, (4) Open Data, (5) Creative Commons licensing, and (5) Wikipedia-style collective writing. Open Access (OA) is focussed primarily on refereed research articles.
    The crucial distinctions revolve mostly around (a) the fundamental difference between author giveaway vs. non-giveaway work and (b) the functional differences between the re-use/re-mix/re-publication needs for peer-reviewed research article texts on the one hand, and data, software and other kinds of digital content on the other.

It is apparently more than just a semantic matter, but a cognitive one, when one gets the cognitively impenetrable idée fixe that OA = OA publishing. OA just means free online access.

"coglanglab" writes:

"coglanglab":
"there are other open-access models"

No, there are OA publishing models. OA itself just means free online access. OA ≠ OA publishing. OA is not a "model." Nor are researchers, making their own published articles freely accessible online, nor their institutions and funders, mandating it, a "model."

Maybe lexical markers will help: OA (free online access) can be provided in two different ways. OA provided through OA journal publishing is called "Gold OA". OA provided through author self-archiving of non-OA journal articles is called "Green OA."

You have unfortunately contracted the (widespread) syndrome of "Gold Fever," whose only perceived goal becomes Gold OA!

But the OA problem is not journal affordability or economic models, it is research accessibility. Gold fever conflates the two, whereas both the NIH Mandate and the HR 801's attempt to overturn it are about Green OA.

"coglanglab":
"everybody... understands that these [mandatory Green OA] policies hurt subscription-based journals"

Everybody? Not those in the best position to know, apparently, namely, the publishers whose authors have been making their articles (Green) OA the most and the longest:

Swan (2005)

"we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)"

Mandated Green OA might or might not eventually lead to Gold OA. That is all just hypothetical conjecture and counterconjecture. What is certain is that it will lead to OA itself: free online access. And that is what the OA movement is all about and for.

"coglanglab":
"papers still need to go through peer-review and publication"

And your point is...?

NIH mandates providing Green OA to fundees' final drafts of their peer-reviewed journal articles.

"coglanglab":
"we have two models: subscription-based journals... and open-access journals"

Yes. And we have one OA -- free online access -- which can be achieved quickly and surely once Green OA is mandated. And that is what both the NIH Mandate and the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it are about. The rest is all distracting and profitless speculation about models for publication cost-recovery, not OA, which means free online access.

"coglanglab":
"[Harnad's] focus is not on open-access journals... so he has some stake in pointing out that there are other open-access models"

My focus is on OA, so I have a stake in pointing out that a focus on Gold OA cost-recovery models is missing the point of the NIH policy, which is about mandating Green OA. And OA is not a "model"; it is free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles.

"coglanglab":
"If these policies make the subscription-based journals less profitable, then the open-access journals presumably become more competitive"

Gold Fever, again: The purpose of the NIH policy is to provide OA -- free online access to the peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from NIH funding -- which it is doing as a matter of certainty by mandating Green OA. The rest is irrelevant speculation and counterspeculation about hypothetical sequelae.

"coglanglab":
"If the open-access policies force subscription-based publishers to raise their own publication fees or go out of business, this presumably should help open-access journals..."

If they do and if it does, then presumably it will. But this is all just hypothetical speculation. What the NIH mandate actually does, with certainty, is provide OA (free online access), remember? And access -- not speculative economics -- is what the OA is about, and for.

"coglanglab":
"if there are good reasons to believe that policies like those of NIH and Harvard harm open-access journals and subscription journals alike, then I'd like to know..."

There are good reasons to believe that universal mandated Green OA might eventually induce a transition to Gold OA and there are also good reasons to believe it might not. But what is certain is that that universal mandated Green OA will provide universal OA -- and that the Conyers Bill (HR 801), if passed, will slow or stop that.

So it might be a good idea to restrain the impulse to just keep speculating and counterspeculating about future publishing cost-recovery models and focus instead on providing universal OA while we are still compos mentis and in a position to profit (mentally) from it. And that requires defeating the Conyers Bill.

"coglanglab":
"I'm not really sure what Harnad was getting at in pointing out that some non-profit journals also support Conyers' bill..."

The opposition to Green OA mandates like NIH's comes from journal publishers who argue that it will reduce their revenues and might eventually make the subscription model unsustainable. They may be right or they may be wrong. But they definitely include both for-profit and non-profit publishers.

And, to repeat, OA is free online access to (peer-reviewed) research. OA's purpose is to solve the research accessibility problem. (Not all would-be users can afford to access all research output online today.) Gold OA cannot be mandated. (Publishers are not the fundees or employees of research funders and institutions; the money to pay for Gold OA publishing is currently tied up in subscriptions; research funds are already scarce; and authors don't like to be told where to publish, nor to be required to pay for it.) But Green OA can be mandated, and is being mandated, by NIH plus 66 further funders and institutions worldwide, with many other mandate proposals on the way.

If we can shake off the Gold Fever just long enough to reach for the Green OA that is fully within our grasp, we will have reached (at long last) the optimal, inevitable (and long overdue) outcome for research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the R & D industry, students, teachers, the developing world, and the tax-paying public who fund the research and for whose benefit the research is conducted.

Gold Fever instead focuses obsessively on publishing economics: the publishing tail, that has for too long been wagging the research dog. Green OA mandates are simply the research community taking into its own hands the matter of providing free online access to their own peer-reviewed research output. Whether the peer review service costs continue to be paid via subscriptions, or are instead paid via Gold-OA fees covered out of subscription cancellation savings is a minor matter concerning the dog's tail. We should stop letting that tail wag the dog, by focusing on mandating Green OA (and defeating Conyers-like Bills that try to oppose it), today.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Andrew Brown, wrote in the Guardian (5 Feb):

“[O]pen access is unsatisfactory [because] open-access journals [are] not yet widespread enough... The only answer I can think of is to bring electronic subscriptions into the library system.”

There is another answer: Open Access (OA) does not mean only, or mainly, open-access journals ("Gold OA"). The other, more widespread way to provide OA is for the authors of articles published in non-OA journals to make them OA by depositing an electronic version in an OA Repository ("Green OA"), thereby making them free for all (including those whose libraries cannot afford a subscription) -- as 34 research funding councils worldwide (including all the UK Research Councils, the European Research Council and the US National Institutes of Health) as well as 31 Universities and Faculties (including Southampton, Glasgow and Stirling in the UK, and Harvard and Stanford in the US) have already adopted mandates requiring the authors they fund and employ to do.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum