Definition of Open Access

Science Dissemination using Open Access: A compendium of selected literature on Open Access
Editors: E. Canessa and M. Zennaro (ICTP-SDU, Italy)
Publisher: The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics

Slightly dated (since July 2008), but still informative and recommended.

(1) Two Kinds of OA: Gratis and Libre: There are two kinds of Open Access (OA) -- "gratis" (free online access) and "libre" (free online access plus certain re-use rights) -- but Gideon Burton seems to be writing about OA as if there were only one kind ("libre"). (See: "Open Access: 'Gratis' and 'Libre'")

The gratis/libre distinction matters a lot, because it is critical to the strategy for successfully achieving OA (of either kind) at all. There is still very little OA today, but most of what OA there is is gratis, not libre. The fastest and surest way to achieve 100% OA is for universities and funders to mandate OA, and they are at last beginning to do so. But universities and funders can (and hence should) only mandate gratis OA, not libre OA. All peer-reviewed journal article authors are "give-away authors": They want their work to be freely accessible online. But most do not want their texts themselves (as opposed to just their findings) to be re-used and re-mixed as if they were data, software, or disney cartoons. Author-sanctioned re-use rights can come after we have reached 100% gratis OA; needlessly insisting on them pre-emptively only hampers progress toward reaching 100% OA itself. (See: "The Giveaway/NonGiveaway Distinction")".

(2) Two Ways to Reach 100% OA: The Golden Road and the Green Road: There are two roads to 100% OA, the "golden road" of authors publishing in OA journals and the "green road" of authors publishing in conventional journals but also self-archiving their articles in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) to make them OA. (See: "OA Publishing is OA, but OA is Not OA Publishing").

The green/gold distinction matters even more than the gratis/libre distinction, because Green OA can be mandated by universities and funders, whereas gold OA cannot. Moreover, most journals already have a green (63%) or pale-green (32%) policy on author OA self-archiving, whereas only about 15% of journals are gold OA journals, and the rest cannot be mandated by universities and funders to convert. Universal green OA self-archiving mandates may eventually induce publishers to convert to gold, but they cannot do so if we do not first adopt the green mandates. "Gold Fever" -- treating OA as if it just meant gold OA -- is the single most common error made by commentators on OA (whether proponents or opponents). (See: "Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA").

(3) Two Ways Not to Try to Mandate OA: Too Strong and Too Weak: Gideon Burton is a proponent of a green OA mandate at his own university (Brigham Young University, BYU), and this is very timely, valuable, and welcome. But in advocating the Harvard mandate model -- which is not just a mandate to provide green, gratis OA by depositing articles in the institutional repository, but a requirement for authors to successfully negotiate with their publishers the retention of certain re-use rights -- Gideon is advocating a mandate that is both stronger and weaker than necessary. Not only does such a nonoptimal mandate model make it less likely that a consensus will be successfully reached on adopting an OA mandate at all (has BYU adopted this OA mandate?) but it also makes full author compliance uncertain even if a consensus on adoption is successfully achieved. (See: "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?")

The reason the Harvard mandate model is too strong is that it requires more than just self-archiving in the university's IR: It requires successful rights renegotiation by each author, with each publisher. But since only Harvard authors are subject to the mandate, and not their publishers, the successful outcome of such a negotiation cannot be guaranteed. So the Harvard mandate allows authors to opt out -- which in turn weakens it into something less than a mandate, as authors need not comply. The mandate is too strong, in that it demands more than necessary, which in turn makes it necessary to allow opt-out, weakening it more than necessary. And the mandate is also needlesly weak in that it fails to require immediate deposit, without opt-out, irrespective of the success or failure of rights renegotiations. On the Harvard model, if any author elects to opt out of rights renegotiation, he need not deposit at all.

And yet a mandate to deposit the author's final, peer-reviewed draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, regardless of whether rights have or have not been successfully renegotiated, can provide immediate OA to at least 63% of deposits (as noted above, because 63% of journals are already green on author OA self-archiving) and immediate "Almost-OA" for the remaining 37% (thanks to the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button, whereby any user webwide who reaches any deposit to which access is closed rather than open -- because the publisher has vetoed or embargoed OA to the deposit -- can, with just one click, request a single copy for personal research use, and the author can in turn, likewise with just one click, authorize the immediate automatic emailing of that single copy to the requester by the IR software).

"Almost OA" can tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo period -- but only if immediate deposit is mandated, without opt-out. The Harvard model does not mandate immediate deposit, without opt-out. Most Harvard authors may have the clout and the gumption to successfully negotiate rights retention anyway, but it is far from clear that all, most or even many authors at other universities worldwide would have Harvard-authors' clout or gumption. So not only are many likely to opt out of such an opt-out mandate, but they and their institutions are hence far less likely to opt for adopting such a needlessly strong (and weak) mandate in the first place.

So I suggest that BYU (and all other universities -- and funders too) opt for the optimal green gratis OA mandate -- Immediate Deposit (without Opt-Out) plus Optional Access-Setting (as OA or Closed Access plus the "Almost-OA" Button). (I call this mandate the IDOA mandate and Peter Suber calls it the DDR (Dual Deposit Release) mandate.) If a stronger mandate can successfully achieve consensus on adoption, then by all means adopt that! But on no account delay or imperil achieving successful consensus on adopting a mandate at all, by insisting on a needlessly stronger mandate -- and on no account needlessly weaken the mandate by allowing opt-out from deposit itself. The devil is indeed in these seemingly minor details. (See: "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Every day is Open Access (OA) Day.

OA means free online access to refereed research.

OA can be provided by self-archiving in the author's institutional repository all articles published in non-OA journals ("Green OA") and/or by publishing in OA journals ("Gold OA").

Green OA self-archiving is being mandated by 56 universities and research funders worldwide so far.

Green OA self-archiving needs to be mandated by all universities and research funders worldwide.

The result will be universal OA (and Gold OA will follow soon after).

OA maximizes research access, uptake, usage, impact, productivity, progress and benefits to humankind.

The best thing you can do for OA is to lobby for Green OA self-archiving mandates.

"That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Every day is Open Access Day

Video 1 (intro in French, rest in English)
Video 2
Video 3
PPTs

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Many silly, mindless things have been standing in the way of the optimal and inevitable (i.e., universal Open Access) for years now (canards about permissions, peer review, preservation, etc.), but perhaps the biggest of them is the persistent conflation of OA with OA publishing: OA means free online access to refereed journal articles ("gratis" OA means access only, "libre" OA means also various re-use rights).

OA to refereed journal articles can be provided in two ways: by publishing in an OA journal that provides OA (OA publishing, "Gold" OA) or by publishing in a non-OA journals and self-archiving the article ("Green" OA).

Hence Green OA, which is full-blooded OA, is OA, but it is not OA publishing -- just as apples are fruit, but fruit are not apples.

Hence the many OA mandates that are being adopted by universities and research funders worldwide are not Gold OA publishing mandates, they are Green OA self-archiving mandates.

It is not doing the OA cause, or progress towards universal OA one bit of good to keep portraying it as a publishing reform movement, with Gold OA publishing as its sole and true goal.

The OA movement's sole and true goal is OA itself, universal OA.

Whether or not universal OA will eventually lead to universal Gold OA publishing is a separate, speculative question.

OA means OA, and OA publishing is merely one of the forms it can take.

(I post this out of daily frustration at continuing to see OA spoken of as synonymous with OA publishing, and of even hearing Green OA self-archiving mandates misdescribed as "OA publishing mandates" [e.g., 1, 2].)

If only we could stop doing this conflation, OA would have a better chance of reaching the optimal and inevitable before the heat death of the universe...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Institutional Repositories (IRs) are for institutional research output (mostly their authors' final drafts of their published, peer-reviewed journal articles). IRs are not for institutional buy-in of the output of other institutions. (That would be an institutional library.) The way Open Access (OA) works is that an institution makes its own research output free for all online, in order to maximize its visibility, usage and impact. By symmetry, the institution's users also get access to the output of all other institutions' IRs, for free. No subscriptions, no fees, no consortia, no need for an institutional affiliation for anyone but the author of the work in the IR.

That’s OA. Almost-OA is when some of the IR material is still under a publisher embargo, so it is deposited as Closed Access instead of Open Access, and can be accessed using the IR’s almost-immediate “email eprint request” Button during the embargo. Almost-OA is not OA, but together with universal Immediate Deposit mandates, it will soon usher in universal OA.

In contrast, Joseph Esposito’s “Almost OA” is just a variant on institutional consortial licensing. It has no more to do with OA than being Almost Pregnant has to do with parity.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Re-posted from Peter Suber's Open Access News. (This is to register 100% agreement on this definition of "Gratis" and "Libre" OA, and on the new choice of terms.)

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Peter Suber:

    Green/Gold OA and Gratis/Libre OA

This table is to accompany an article in the August issue of SOAN, which I [Peter Suber] just mailed.  But I hope it will also be useful in its own right.  (SOAN uses plain text and doesn't support tables.) 

	Gratis OA (removing price barriers)	Libre OA (removing both price and permission barriers)
Green OA (through repositories)	1	2
Gold OA (through journals)	3	4

Some observations:

• In April 2008, Stevan Harnad and I proposed some terms to describe two kinds of free online access:  the kind which removes price barriers alone and the kind which removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers as well.  The distinction is fundamental and widely-recognized, but we saw right away that our terms (weak OA and strong OA) were ill-chosen and we stopped using them.  However, all of us who work for OA and talk about OA still need vocabulary to describe this basic distinction.  The most neutral and descriptive terms I've been able to find so far are "gratis OA" and "libre OA", and I've decided use them myself until I find better ones.  This choice of terms is personal and provisional.  But to make it more effective, I wanted to explain it in public.
• "Gratis" and "libre" may not be familiar terms in the domain of scholarly communication and OA.  But in the neighboring domain of free and open source software, they exactly express the distinction I have in  mind.
• The main point of this table is to show that the gratis/libre distinction is not synonymous with the green/gold distinction.  The green/gold distinction is about venues.  The gratis/libre distinction is about user rights or freedoms. 
• All four cells of the table are non-empty.  Green OA can be gratis or libre, and gold OA can be gratis or libre. 
• Libre OA includes or presupposes gratis OA.  But neither green nor gold OA presupposes the other, although they are entirely compatible and much literature is both.
• All four cells can contain peer-reviewed literature.  None of these parameters is about bypassing peer review.   
• Because there are many different permission barriers to remove, there many different degrees or kinds of libre OA.  Gratis OA is just one thing, but libre OA is a range of things. 
• The BBB definition describes one kind or subset of libre OA.  But not all libre OA is BBB OA. 
• I'm  not proposing a change in the BBB definition, and I haven't retreated an inch in my support for it.  I'm simply proposing vocabulary to help us talk unambiguously about two species of free online access.

This blog post is just a sketch.  For more detail, see the full SOAN article.

Peter Suber

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"Just what is open access?... In an open access journal, there's no charge for reading articles... Yes, that's pretty much all there is to the definition."

No, unfortunately that is not the definition of OA (which actual means free online access), it is just the definition of Gold OA publishing, one of the two ways to provide OA (and not the fastest or surest way).

The single most important reason OA is not yet growing anywhere near as quickly as it could and should is this persistent perpetuation of the myth that OA is just Gold OA.

Nature's latest reply to the widespread (and mostly valid) criticism evoked by Nature's recent critique of its competitor, Gold OA publisher PLoS, although it perpetuates a few minor misunderstandings of its own, is far closer to the truth in its conclusion:

"[N]one of this may matter very much in the longer run since truly widespread open access to scientific content is coming about through funder-mandated [Green open-access self-] archiving, not [Gold] open-access publishing."

(Nature's reply states that "Nature isn't anti-open access," but it neglects to mention that Nature back-slid in 2005 -- from having at first been Green on OA self-archiving by its authors to rejoining instead the minority of journals who still try to embargo access. Nature's reply also misses the real growth region of Green OA mandates, which is now institutional and departmental mandates like Southampton's, QUT's, Minho's, CERN's, Liege's, and now Harvard's and Stanford's, rather than just funder mandates.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Stan Katz has blogged a summary of the OA session at the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) Meeting in Montreal in the the Chronicle of Higher Education Review. Here are six little clarifications:

(1) SK: "Open Access [OA] [means that] all scholarly articles ought to be mounted on free public access websites maintained by their universities.

" This brief definition is fine as a 1st cut.

(2) SK: "[T]he obligation [i.e., recent mandates like Harvard's] to “publish” by mounting articles on free websites will make it impossible for nonprofit presses and learned societies to sustain themselves."

The mandates are for authors to mount (i.e., self-archive) the final, refereed draft of their published article, not to "publish" it by mounting it. This self-archived "Green OA" draft is a supplement, provided for all users whose institutions cannot afford access to the publisher's version. It is not itself another publication.

The publisher might be nonprofit or commercial; that is not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether or not the supplementary OA draft causes cancellations, rendering journal subscriptions unsustainable for covering costs. So far, in the few fields where OA self-archiving has been taking place the longest (15 years) and most extensively (100%) -- e.g. high-energy physics, published by the American Physical Society (APS), the Institute of Physics (IOP) and Reed-Elsevier -- the publishers report that they find no detectable subscription cancellations associated with self-archiving:

However, if and when OA self-archiving ever does cause catastrophic cancellations, making subscriptions unsustainable, then, and only then, journals can (a) offload all their former access-provision and archiving functions, along with their costs, onto the distributed network of institutional repositories, (b) downsize to peer review alone, and (c) convert to the "Gold OA" publication-cost-recovery model, charging the author-institution, per outgoing paper, for peer review and certification instead of charging the user-institution, per incoming journal, for access. The institutions will (on the very same hypothesis, of catastrophic cancellations) have more than enough annual windfall subscription cancellation savings out of which to cover those charges.

(3) SK: "Harnad’s suggestion is that the universities transfer the payments they are currently making to their academic presses to subsidize peer review and archiving of their faculty scholarly output."

No, my suggestion is only that universities should mandate self-archiving. Then, if and when the resulting universal OA should ever make subscriptions become unsustainable, the universities' subscription savings will, by the same token, be freed to pay for the university's peer-review costs. That is no subsidy: It is direct payment for a service, out of the very same funds formerly used to purchase a product.

(4) SK: "[U]niversities increasingly expect their presses to be self-sustaining economically, and are unlikely to put up the necessary funding"

Extra funding by whom for whom for for what? While universities are subscribing to journals, that pays for peer review. If and when journal subscriptions collapse, the university savings will pay for the peer review. (And again this has nothing to do with university presses in particular.)

(5) SK: "[N]ot all scholars (and nonprofit publishers) are connected to universities. Who will subvene their publications?"

Unaffiliated scholars are rare enough, and the per-paper costs of peer review alone are low enough, so that a small surcharge on the charges of the affiliated authors (the vast majority) will take care of these outliers.

And as noted, neither whether publishers are nonprofit or commercial publishers, nor whether they are university or learned-society publishers, is relevant to any of this.

(6) SK: "[OA has] different... implications...for the humanities and social sciences"

OA pertains to refereed journal articles publication in all disciplines. Humanities and social sciences are not exceptions in any way. All research, in all scholarly and scientific disciplines, benefits from maximizing its uptake, usage, applications and impact by eliminating the access-barriers that have been made obsolete and unnecessary by the advent of the PostGutenberg Galaxy.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: There are two forms of OA: free access online, and free access plus re-use licenses of various kinds. The first is provisionally called "OA1" and the second "OA2". These are place-holders pending better terms to be proposed shortly. Green OA self-archiving can in principle provide either OA1 or OA2. All authors [of peer-reviewed journal articles] want OA1 (i.e., all authors want their published articles freely accessible online). Nevertheless, most authors still think it is not possible to make their articles freely accessible online (for at least 34 reasons, each of them leading to Zeno's Paralysis, all of them groundless, the most frequent ones being that authors think it would violate copyright, bypass peer review, or entail a lot of work on their part). So although all peer-reviewed journal article authors (and definitely not not true of all book authors, software authors, music authors, video authors) do want their work to be freely accessible to all would-be users, not just those who can afford the access tolls, most (85%) of them still don't make their articles freely accessible online (by self-archiving them). That is why Green OA self-archiving mandates by researchers' universities and funders are needed: To cure Zeno's Paralysis.

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[See also: OA Primer for the Perplexed: I]

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Talat Chaudhri wrote:

TC: "The argument made by Stevan Harnad... is marred by the repeated assertion that "all authors want OA1" (his term, i.e. what we have hitherto been asked to call Green OA self-archiving)."

(1) As announced on this list, there are two forms of OA, free access online, and free access plus re-use licenses of various kinds. The first is provisionally called "OA1" and the second "OA2". These are place-holders pending better terms to be proposed shortly. Green OA self-archiving can in principle provide either OA1 or OA2.

(2) All authors [of peer-reviewed journal articles] want OA1 (i.e., all authors want their published articles freely accessible online) is true (and I challenge Talat to find an author who would not want his article freely accessible online).

But what is also true is that most authors still think it is not possible to make their articles freely accessible online (for at least 34 reasons, each of them leading to Zeno's Paralysis, all of them groundless, and the most frequent ones being that authors think it would violate copyright, bypass peer review, or entail a lot of work on their part).

So it is not hard at all to see that it is true of all peer-reviewed journal article authors (and definitely not not true of all book authors, software authors, music authors, video authors) that they want their work to be freely accessible to all would-be users, not just those who can afford the access tolls.

It's also easy to see why: Because refereed journal-article authors write for research impact, not for royalty income.

It is likewise not hard to see that even though all journal authors, without exception, would want their articles to be freely accessible online, most (85%) of them still don't make their articles freely accessible online (by self-archiving them).

That is precisely why Green OA self-archiving mandates by researchers' universities and funders are needed: To cure refereed journal article authors of the 34 unfounded phobias of Zeno's Paralysis:

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.

Zeno wanted to walk across the room too: He just (wrongly)

TC: "The experience of a repository manager quickly shows that many academics do not want it, largely because they are afraid of what it may entail and very badly informed about the benefits to themselves and to their disciplines."

You are stating the objective facts incorrectly: Most academics do not do it (self-archive). That is not evidence that they do not want their articles freely accessible. It is merely (as you note) evidence that they are informed and afraid. This in no way contradicts what I said (that these authors all want OA for their articles -- whereas other kinds of authors, of other kinds of work, do not all want OA).

TC: "In fact, when it is asserted that "all authors" want Green OA, in fact all that seems to be true is that all respondents to the studies cited in fact want it."

No, it is much stronger than that. But Alma Swan's sizable international, interdisciplinary studies are pretty good evidence of it too (and so is the latest study, from Australia:

Anthony Austin, Maree Heffernan, and Nikki David (2008) Academic authorship, publishing agreements and open access: Survey Results, a new report from the OAK Law Project.

The question to ask is not "do you think it is possible to make your article OA?" but "Would you want your article to be OA if it were possible?" Refereed-journal article authors would all reply Yes; other authors, of other kinds of work (or the same authors, wearing different hats) would reply No. (The rest is just Zeno's Paralysis.)

TC: "I have encountered whole departments that contained maybe only one member of staff who was favourable towards OA and otherwise showed ignorance of the issues. This is not their fault but ours for failing to accompany efforts towards mandates with the appropriate grass-roots advocacy. These mandates are necessary, I agree (as stated in the past)."

You are quite right that grass-roots advocacy and reliable information is important. But your conclusion is dead wrong. Ignorance about the possibility of OA is not at all evidence that refereed journal article authors would not all want their articles to be freely accessible to all would-be users. Until this token drops for you, Talat, you still don't quite get the point.

TC: "I wonder if Stevan can substantiate the comment that "all authors want OA1" that I see repeated here, and reconcile that opinion to the statement that I have made about my own practical experience as a repository manager that it isn't in fact the case across all disciplines."

To repeat, you are talking about apples and I am talking about oranges.

You have no evidence that there exist any (journal article) authors who would not want OA1 for their articles (though there is plenty of evidence that there are plenty of other kinds of authors of other kinds of work who would not).

OA1 means free access online. Don't ask your authors whether they think it is legal to self-archive their articles. Don't ask them whether they think doing so will destroy publishing. Don't even ask them whether they think it is possible. Don't ask them whether they think it would be complicated or time-consuming. They are uninformed and afraid, as you say. Just ask them whether -- if it were possible, and quick and easy, and not illegal, and would not destroy publishing -- then would they self-archive?

And then ask authors of other kinds of works (book, software, audio, video) whether they too would give away their writings free online if it were possible, easy, legal and would not destroy publishing. Then you will have a clearer idea of what people really have on their minds.

TC: "I find it impossible to believe that my university is so exceptional!"

Your university is not exceptional: You are simply taking false beliefs about OA1 as evidence of lack of desire for OA1, and that is simply a logical non sequitur.

TC: "I might add that these are largely arts departments, at whom OA advocacy has never been primarily targeted."

As I said, OA is not (yet) about books, and arts are book-intensive disciplines. But they do published in refereed journals too, so ask them only about their journal articles, and they will be no different from any other discipline.

Your point is a non sequitur if what you want to say is that because authors in book-based (or audio- or video- software-based) disciplines consider their books (audio, video, software) more important than their journal articles, they are somehow exceptions to the universal desire of refereed journal article authors in all disciplines for OA1 to their articles.

As to the kinds of work these disciplines don't want to give away: They are simply not relevant to this discussion. (Nor will "targeting" them make much difference, at least for now.)

TC: "Quite rightly, they feel that they have been treated as an add-on to the needs of science disciplines in evolving new forms of academic publishing."

This is a non sequitur and has nothing to do with OA.

TC: "This has been directly stated in print by a member of our English department (their English Association newsletter) - sadly and ironically I don't think an online version exists for me to give you the link. It makes a rather interesting, albeit local, case study. But perhaps Stevan will argue that this is just one unrepresentative case. If so, the lady doth protest too much."

No, what I argue is that I have no idea what this member of your English department was complaining about, but I am pretty sure it is not the topic under discussion here, which is that all authors of peer reviewed journal articles want OA1 for their articles (but 85% of them believe it is not possible).

TC: "I'm sorry, by no means would I mean to wreck the party. Nonetheless, my above point entirely vitiates the article."

Talat, we have absolutely no idea what your English department author was complaining about when he said he felt like an add-on to the needs of science. You haven't told us. But we can be pretty sure it is irrelevant to what we are talking about here.

TC: "In simple terms that I feel can be useful to those actually engaged in advancing Green OA, I feel that both parties in this argument"

There are no two parties, and there is no coherent argument, as far as I can see.

TC: "...correctly support different forms of OA,"

What different forms of OA are we talking about? OA1 (free online access) and OA2 (free online access plus licensed re-use)? Or something else? (Books? Irrelevant.)

TC: "that advancing the cause of one in no way need undermine the other"

Until you state clearly what the one and the other is, and who is arguing what, why, there is neither advancing nor undermining, just talking past one another.

TC: "(these fears are a phantom and a paranoia in my view) and that very little of the debate below is of practical use in putting OA into practice."

I'm lost. We were formerly speaking of practical things (access, impact, mandates, peer review, and the question of whether there are any individuals or disciplines that are exception to the obvious truism that the impact-seeking authors of journal articles differ fundamentally from the royalty-seeking authors of just about anything else), but now we seem to be talking about unspecified gripes of one English department member regarding "science publishing."

TC: "In fact, it took me a long time to read and digest while I could have been engaging in targeted advocacy aimed at departments and management in achieving both voluntary archiving in the meantime and mandates as soon as possible. If a post contains misinformation, as I submit above, how are we repository managers to make sense of the argument and make any use of it? I am certainly perplexed, as primed by Stevan's most recent post."

I recommend giving it some more serious thought.

TC: "Stevan, you don't answer the point. I have several departments most of whose members do not want their articles published on open access, as stated directly to me. Your idea that they want it but are afraid to do it is in direct conflict with what they themselves state. (I'm not in a position to give you a list of their names! This would clearly not be in the interests of advocacy in my institution.) It may well be because they are uninformed, but nonetheless the truth is clearly that at present they do not want OA for these reasons, whether or not they are afraid of it. The distinction you make is absolutely fallacious and does not serve your analysis.

"I am clearly not alone in this experience as a repository manager. Let's not post fiction on the list, it is risible to suggest as you do that all academics are of one mind in any respect as regards OA, which is patently untrue. This said, I regret that there is no point addressing the rest of your email at all.

"As stated many times, I support Green OA entirely, constant alterations to the terminology notwithstanding."

With all due respect, I think Talat Chaudri, is not only mistaken, but has not yet understood the fundamental point at issue, concerning the profound difference between give-away and non-give-away writings -- the very cornerstone of OA.

The question is not whether, if one took an opinion poll, one would not indeed find that the vast majority (85%) of researchers do not currently want to provide OA to their articles by self-archiving them. That is already abundantly apparent from the fact that they are not doing it! (That is why the Green OA mandates were needed.)

The question is whether or not those researchers would want their articles to be accessible to all users (rather than just those whose institutions could afford subscription access) if it were possible/feasible (despite the many worries they may have about whether it is possible, legal, etc).

The answer to that question is not a self-serving counterfactual tautology; rather, it reveals a genuine, fundamental and profound PostGutenberg distinction, the one that gave birth to the OA era itself.

The answer to that specific, conditional question, by those specific authors (refereed research journal authors), is needed to reveal the real underlying distinction between their special case, and the case of the authors of the many other kinds of content one can list (books, textbooks, music, video, software, even data): The answer of the authors of the latter kinds of content would definitely not be the same as the answer of the refereed research article authors. The authors of other kinds of content (though not necessarily all of them!) do not create their content purely for the sake of research usage and impact, but for the sake of potential sales-royalties. Hence they would definitely not want those contents to be accessible free for all.

I am certain that there are plenty of vague, uninformative and even misleading ways of putting or understanding this question, ways that will merely engage researchers' factual uninformedness or unfounded assumptions about the consequences of making their research articles freely accessible online. It is of no interest, Talat, if you keep replying to me on the basis of such answers to such questions.

But as it is, you do not even reply at all. You quote anonymous replies to unspecified questions as if they were the result of an actual poll on the actual point I keep making, which is that all authors of of one specific kind of content do want their documents accessible to all users, regardless of whether they pay, whereas some authors of other kinds of content do not.

Until you are prepared to be more specific, we are talking at cross purposes.

There is no reason, however, for anyone else to be deterred or misdirected by this persistent incomprehension, as there are plenty of public surveys that have already been conducted, across disciplines, across institutions, across countries and across languages (several by Alma Swan and co-workers, the latest a recently announced one by the OAK Law Project in Australia). They all find exactly the same thing: A virtually universal desire by research article authors that everyone should be able to access their papers for free, but a desire that is suspended in inaction for 50-85% of these authors by (1) unawareness of objective, verifiable facts, (2) unfounded legal worries, and (4) unfounded worries about whether their article would be accepted for publication if it were made OA, (5) unfounded worries about peer review, (6) unfounded worries about the amount of effort it would require to make their articles OA, even if it were possible, legal, etc.

Talat is well aware of all this misinformation, and the need to dispel it through valid information and advocacy, but there is one fundamental, underlying reality he himself has failed to understand, which is that there is something profoundly different about refereed research journal articles, something that is invariant across all disciplines, and that distinguishes this sort of content from all other forms of content, and that is that it is author give-away content, written only to be used, applied and cited, not to be bought and sold behind toll-access barriers. I continue to point out that this alone is the fundamental reality distinguishing OA content (or rather, OA's  would-be target content!) from other kinds of content, and the reality underlying the inevitability and optimality of OA itself (for this special target content).

Talat has been influenced by vague, uninformed opinions expressed by some of his institutional colleagues in some disciplines concerning what is actually possible and what ought to be the case, and why. We already know (and agree) that the  vast majority of researchers -are factually misinformed. Talat recognises the need to inform them, but does not recognise that truth-valued propositions that are made about matters of fact, on the basis of the presence of incorrect information or the absence of correct information, are in fact untrue propositions! That is why the only way to ask researchers about what they truly want is first to dissociate their answers from these incorrect facts, which they falsely believe.

Sorry to have had to take all this space to explicate the logic of the disagreement with Talat's point, longhand. But unfortunately, if unchallenged, Talat's statement that he has evidence (from un-named informants) that they would not, in fact, want their refereed research articles to be free for all (and hence that they do not differ from most other authors of other kinds of content in this regard) would simply add to the (already excessive) volume of misinformation (that Talat is himself committed to dispelling).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: OA1 is Free Access and OA2 is Licensed Re-Use. Green OA self-archiving by authors, mandated by their universities or funders, can in principle provide OA1 or OA2, for either articles or data or both. However, it would be difficult, resisted by many authors, and probably unjust for universities to mandate Green OA1 for data or to mandate Green OA2 for either articles or data. (Funders are in a position to mandate more.)
    Researchers may not want to make their data either freely accessible/useable or re-usable, and they may not want to make their articles freely re-useable. However, all researchers, without exception, want their articles freely accessible/usable (OA1).
    This is the reason Green OA1 mandates are the highest priority. Authors all want Green OA1 and they report that they will comply, willingly (see Swan studies) and actually do comply (see Sale studies) with Green OA1 mandates from their universities and funders to self-archive their articles.
    Moreover, OA1 for articles prepares the way and is likely to lead to OA1 and OA2 for data, as well as to some OA2 for articles.
    That is why Green OA1 self-archiving and Green OA1 self-archiving mandates should be assigned priority.
    Peter Murray-Rust, who is concerned exclusively with OA2 (re-useability) for both articles and data, persistently misunderstands much of this.

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Peter Murray-Rust continues to misunderstand, and hence misrepresent OA. The picture is a lot simpler than Peter makes it sound. Here's a simple glossary:

1. Research Data vs. Research Articles:

Data: Research generates raw data.
Articles: Research generates journal articles describing, analyzing and interpreting the raw data.
Data in Articles: Sometimes articles don't just describe but actually contain raw data.
Articles as Data: Sometimes the articles themselves are treated as data.

2. OA1 (Free Access) vs OA2 (Free Re-Use):

OA1: Articles made accessible/useable free online for users who do not have subscription access to the journal in which they are published.
OA2: Articles or data made accessible/useable free online with various kinds of re-use licenses.

(There is only one OA1 but there are several degrees of OA2, depending on which re-uses are licensed.)

3. The Green vs. Gold Roads to OA:

Green OA: Authors make their articles and/or their data OA1 or OA2 by self-archiving them online.
Gold OA: Journals make their articles OA1 or OA2.

Green OA self-archiving by authors, mandated by their universities or funders, can in principle provide OA1 or OA2, for either articles or data or both. However, it would be difficult, resisted by many authors, and probably unjust for universities to mandate Green OA1 for data or to mandate Green OA2 for either articles or data. (Funders are in a position to mandate more.)

Researchers may not want to make their data either freely accessible/useable or re-usable, and they may not want to make their articles freely re-useable. However, all researchers, without exception, want their articles freely accessible/usable (OA1).

This is the reason Green OA1 mandates are the highest priority. Authors all want Green OA1 and they report that they will comply, willingly (see Swan studies) and actually do comply (see Sale studies) with Green OA1 mandates from their universities and funders to self-archive their articles.

Moreover, OA1 for articles prepares the way and is likely to lead to OA1 and OA2 for data, as well as to some OA2 for articles.

That is why Green OA1 self-archiving and Green OA1 self-archiving mandates should be assigned priority.

Peter Murray-Rust, who is concerned exclusively with OA2 (re-useability) for both articles and data, persistently misunderstands much of this, especially the practical causal path and its attendant priorities.

Here are the kinds of misunderstandings that keep recurring in Peter's discussion of Green OA1 [translations are provided in brackets]:

PMR: "Green Open Access [OA1 to articles] is irrelevant to Open Data [OA1 or OA2 to data] (I think it makes it harder, others disagree)."

No, OA1 to articles is not irrelevant, either to OA1 to articles or data, or to OA2 (licensed re-use rights) to articles and data. Nor does OA1 make it harder to achieve OA2 (for articles or data). But it would certainly make it harder to achieve Green OA1 for articles through Green OA1 mandates if we tried pre-emptively to insist on OA2 instead, or first.

PMR: "There is no explicit mention in the GreenOA upload model [Green OA1 to articles] for items other than the “full-text” [data]."

There is no "GreenOA upload model" but there is Green OA1 self-archiving of articles, and Green OA1 mandates to self-archive articles. Data and OA2 can certainly be mentioned in these mandates, but they cannot be mandated (because not all authors wish to provide OA1 to their data, or OA2 to their articles or data, whereas all authors wish to provide OA1 to their articles (even if it needs to be mandated to get them to actually do it!).

PMR: "The primary goal of Stevan Harnad - expressed frequently to me and others - is that we should strive for 100% GOA [mandated Green OA1 to articles]compliance and that discussions on Open Data, licences and other matters [OA2 to articles, OA1 or OA2 to data] are a distraction and are harmful to the GOA process."

What is distracting and harmful for getting consensus and compliance on Green OA1 mandates, hence for getting OA1 to articles, is not the discussion of OA2 or of data, but the suggestion that it is not enough to mandate OA1 to articles. The time to insist on more than Green OA1 mandates is when Green OA1 is already faithfully mandated and provided, not before Green OA1 mandates have prevailed.

PMR: "if Open Data [OA2 to data] is irrelevant or inimical to GOA [OA1 to articles] then it is hard to see GOA [OA1 to articles] as supportive of Open Data [OA2 to data]."

Pre-emptive insistence on OA2 to data (or articles) is inimical to achieving consensus and compliance on mandating OA1 to articles. Achieving OA1 to articles will certainly facilitate going on to achieve OA1 and OA2 to data as well as achieving some OA2 to articles.

PMR: "my main argument is that lack of support for Open Data in GOA [OA2 to data and articles] is potentially harmful to the Open Data movement [OA2 to data and articles]. Let’s assume that Stevan’s approach succeeds and we get 100% of papers in repositories through University mandates, funders et. al... [This] GOA [mandated OA1 to articles] will encourage the deposition of full-text only [articles, not data]"

Green OA1 mandates can encourage OA1 to data and OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but they cannot mandate them, because all authors want OA1 for their articles but not all authors want OA1 for their data or OA2 for their articles and data. And pre-emptively insisting on more will only result in getting less (i.e., less consensus and compliance on OA1 for articles).

PMR: "So my major concern is that GreenOA [OA1 to articles] will lead to substandard processes for publishing scientific data. I’d be happy to find Repositories that insist on data upload [OA1 to data]."

I would be happy if we had 100% OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but I know of no realistic way to achieve that, and certainly not directly, because it is not the case that 100% of authors want it already, in principle. But 100% of authors do want OA1 to their articles already, in principle, and they can and do provide that OA1 it in practice if it is mandated.

I find it hard to imagine that the universal practice of providing OA1 to articles can fail to strengthen the inclination to provide OA1 and OA2 to data and articles as well. On the other hand, it is easy to see how insisting pre-emptively on the latter could prevent even the former from coming into universal practice.

PMR: "a GreenOA paper [OA1] may often be a cut-down, impoverished, version of what is available - for a price - on the publishers website. It may, and usually will, lack the supporting information (supplemental data). It will probably not reproduce any permissions that the publisher actually allows. So - if we concern ourselves with matters other than human eyeballs and fulltext - it is almost certainly a poorer resource than the one on the publisher site."

This point is truly perplexing. What is available on a (non-OA) publisher's website is not even OA1, so what is the point of talking about OA1's impoverishment to those would-be users who are not rich enough to afford the publisher's version?

And, yes, OA1 (free online access/use) is not OA2 (free online access/use and re-use licenses, to either article or data), because not all authors wish to provide OA2 to their articles or data, and Green OA1 mandates hence do not attempt to mandate it.

However, data too can certainly be self-archived in Institutional Repositories (IRs) if the author wishes, and IRs have the metadata tags for specifying re-use rights (OA2), if any, for all deposited articles and data.

PMR: "Many funders... require ultra-strong-OA for their archival... [OA2 to articles and data] And several [Gold OA2] publishers... also insist on CC-BY [OA2 to articles]. This is, of course, great for scientific data [OA2 to data]. But it’s a long way from GreenOA [OA1 to articles]."

Yes, some funders can and do mandate more than OA1 to articles. He who pays the piper calls the tune -- so funders are in a better position to do this than universities are (and funders do not need authors' consensus or consent, as universities do, for the conditions they attach to receiving research funding). But so far that funder-mandated OA2 applies only to articles (and usually only after an embargo period), not to data (although funders could in principle mandate data self-archiving too, and eventually will, I hope).

What Gold OA publishers provide is another matter; the OA1 problem is the problem of the 90% of journals that are non-OA, not the 10% that are OA. (Moreover, most Gold OA journals, too, provide only OA1, as Peter Suber has pointed out, not OA2.)

PMR: "Even if the IRs contained all the data appropriate to the publications how do we discover it?"

If authors self-archive their data, the IRs allow them both to link the data with the corresponding articles and to specify the re-uses licensed.

PMR: "GreenOA [OA1] is designed to be simple. Stevan Harnad argues that it can be accomplished with 'one-click'."

No, it is not OA1 self-archiving that is one-click, it is almost-OA via the "Fair Use" Button -- for deposits that are not Open Access (OA1) Closed Access.

The deposit of the full-text itself takes under six minutes' worth of keystrokes, as described in

Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) A Longitudinal Study of the Practice of Self-Archiving.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum