Publishing Reform

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SUMMARY: Comments on Cliff Lynch's "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points":
"Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?" Universities and research funders can and do mandate OA (Green) self-archiving. Cliff seems to be fixated on waiting instead for a transition to OA (Gold) Publishing (and a rather vague definition of OA as "reduced barriers"). He recognizes that Gold's asking price is too high, but not that the transition is also far too uncertain, has already wasted far too much time, and is out of the hands of the research community, whereas Green OA mandates are fast, sure, virtually cost-free, and entirely within the hands of researchers, their universities and their funders. Cliff thinks Green OA is "less optimal" for no reason other than that he thinks it will lead to "fragmentation": Of course it won't: the unifying glue for distributed journal articles is their metadata tags, including their journal's name, not the glue binding any journal's contents.
"Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers." Advice and support from universities (and funders) on retaining rights is welcome, but rights retention is not a necessary precondition for self-archiving, nor for mandating self-archivhiving; so if it poses any obstacle to agreement on immediate adoption of a self-archiving mandate (e.g., because researchers are concerned that rights retention might constrain their choice of journals or might put too big a negotiating burden on them), it should be dropped. On no account should rights-retention be a substitute or precondition for mandating deposit of all articles in the Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Even if the deposit is provisionally set as "Closed Access" during an embargo period, all immediate research usage needs can be fulfilled by each IR's semi-automatic individual EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button.
"We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies." It is not at all clear why we need to do that! What we need is OA. Green Self-Archiving mandates provide 100% OA. Publisher permission -- whether Scholarly Society or commercial -- is not required for funders and universities to mandate immediate deposit. It is not a conversion to Gold OA publishing that is being mandated. (Funders and universities can only impose mandates on their fundees and employees, not on publishers.) In any case, the funding of Scholarly Societies' "good works" should not be subsidized at the cost of researchers' lost usage and impact. (Cliff does not disagree, but the reason he wants to talk is because he is thinking only of Gold.)
"We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing." Cliff is right to be sceptical about Gold OA's current asking price but this is only an issue for those who for some reason want to promote immediate conversion to Gold OA, right now. For those who merely seek 100% OA now, the current price of Gold is irrelevant.
"Open Access Is Not a Threat to Peer Review: In Fact, It Has Nothing to Do with Peer Review -- but It Is Also Time to Talk about Peer Review." OA has nothing to do with peer review. Cliff wants to talk about peer review reform anyway. That's fine, but why in an OA context? The research community needs OA (to all peer-reviewed journal articles), now; peer-review reform is a different agenda.
"Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End: Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity." The research community needs OA (to all peer-reviewed journal articles), now; publishing reform is a different agenda.

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Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Thread:
"Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives" (started Mar 2003)

At the SPARC/ARL Forum on "Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research Policy Issues and Practical Strategies" (Oct 20 2006), Cliff Lynch presented "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points". Some of Cliff's six points are welcome and valid but a few are a bit more debatable:

Lynch: "1. Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?
"I don't want to spend time here arguing about a precise definition of open access -- suffice it to say that open access means an increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature..."

Unfortunately, it does not suffice to say that Open Access (OA) is just "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature."

OA is a very specific special case of the "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature," and it does not help to dissolve that specific case into the vaguer general category of "reducing barriers":

OA is free online access to peer-reviewed research journal articles.

Neither (i) the specific problem that OA is specifically meant to solve -- that of making research accessible to all its would-be users online -- nor (ii) the specific means of solving that specific problem is brought into focus by blurring the objective into generalities about "reducing barriers."

The means of solving the specific problem of OA is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate OA self-archiving ("Green OA") of peer-reviewed research journal articles:

"Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?"

And although there is a link between (1) research accessibility and (2) journal affordability, that link is indirect, and subtle, in the online age. It would be incorrect and simplistic to imagine that the research accessibility problem and the journal affordability problem (or their respective solutions) are one and the same. They are not.

Lynch: "There's been a lot of discussion about the desirability and potential implications of federal government mandates about deposit and access to the reports of findings of federally funded research. We should not forget that, even in disciplines where federal agencies are generous funders, a substantial part of the literature reports on the results of research that isn't federally funded."

That is why the discussion is about both funder mandates and institutional mandates: That covers all research output, funded and unfunded. (See Lynch's own Point 2.)

Lynch: "In my view, when we think about the fundamental integrity of the scholarly record available for open access via the Internet, we would be much better served if we can make the shift to open access at the level of entire journals or entire publisher journal portfolios rather than article by article."

100% OA would be welcome in any way it could be provided, whether Green OA, by self-archiving 100% of journal articles, or "Gold OA", by converting 100% of journals to OA publishing, and then publishing therein.

But most publishers are not converting to OA Gold publishing; and funders and institutions cannot mandate that they convert.

Moreover (as Cliff points out in two of his other, valid points below) there is the sticky question of the per-article asking price for OA Gold publishing, which is rather arbitrary at this time. Gold OA is not worth purchasing at any price -- in view of the fact that Green OA is available as an alternative, and can be mandated, and can drive the price of Gold OA down to the true cost of the essentials.

Hence there is no earthly reason to wait and hope for a direct transition to 100% OA via Gold OA, journal by journal. What needs to be OA is the articles, and those can and should and will be made 100% OA via institution/funder self-archiving mandates of exactly the kind that are increasingly being implemented and proposed today.

If there is to be Gold OA at all, then the road to Gold OA is via Green OA. But once we have mandated 100% Green OA, we already have 100% OA, so whether or not there is eventually a transition to Gold OA becomes supererogatory. Rather than speculating about this now, we should get on with doing the do-able task of mandating and providing Green OA.

Lynch: "We know from past experience that it's very difficult for many users of the scholarly record to understand what they are navigating and exploiting when there's only partial coverage. "

The remedy for that "partial coverage" is not to keep waiting for (and/or to pay the pre-emptive asking price of) journal-by-journal Gold OA, but to mandate Green OA right now, so we can reach 100% OA at long last.

Lynch: "Of course, if we can't persuade the journals and the publishers to support the move to open access, we'll have to go to less optimal approaches like author self-archiving and mandates by specific research funding agencies (both government and private)."

How much longer does Cliff propose that we keep waiting, trying to persuade journals and publishers to move? (We have already been waiting well over a decade now.)

And what determines whether the asking price is the right one (or the "more optimal" approach to 100% OA)?

Lynch: "it may well be that the threat of legislation mandating deposit of research results may be doing more good, in terms of advancing progress and focusing discussion on the issues with a certain sense of urgency, than actual legislation would. And while I'm not opposed to legislative intervention here, I'd hope that any legislation that is enacted is transparent and invisible to authors who publish with journals that appropriately support open access."

It is gratifying to hear that Cliff is not opposed to the OA mandates that have already been enacted and the others that are being planned, but the foregoing passage does sound a bit confusing, or confused: The mandates are to self-archive published articles (Green) not to publish in OA journals (Gold). The goal is to generate OA (Green), not to pressure publishers into converting to Gold.

If what Cliff means is that mandates should not constrain publishers' choice of journals, that makes sense; but journals need not even be mentioned in mandates: Only the requirement to deposit the final peer reviewed draft, as soon as it is accepted for publication, has to be mentioned. And if the mandates allow an embargo period at all (most OA advocates don't think they should, or need to, but if some funders are nevertheless bent upon allowing delays, as some appear to be), let the allowable embargo be minimal (6 months at most); and during the embargo period, while the deposit is in Closed Access rather than Open Access, all ongoing research access needs webwide can be fulfilled via each Institutional Repository's semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button, which can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA on an individual request basis. Such a an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate also moots any journal copyright policy issues that might have constrained the journal-choice of the author in complying with the mandate.

Lynch: "2. Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers"

Here Cliff is perhaps advocating mandated rights retention, which would not be a bad idea if such a mandate could be successfully adopted over author objections that it too could constrain their choice of journal!

And successful rights negotiation is not really necessary as a precondition for mandated self-archiving. Immediate deposit can be mandated without any reference to journal policy; 70% of journals already endorse immediate setting of access to Open Access. For the remaining 30%, access can be provisionally set to Closed Access and the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button can tide over usage needs during any embargo period. (Embargos will soon collapse under OA usage pressure in any case, as self-archiving grows.)

So the best thing universities can do for OA is not merely to throw their weight behind rights retention by their authors, but to mandate immediate deposit of all final drafts accepted for publication ("postprints"), thereby complementing the funder mandates.

Lynch: "My worst nightmare is that rights to the scholarly literature become so fragmented"

Practices should not be dictated by nightmares but by clear reasoning, in the light of day: Once the full-texts of all articles are self-archived and freely accessible online, all the uses Cliff envisages (automatic harvesting, data-mining, etc.) come with the (free, online) territory, inexorably. No need to keep them all in the same (Gold) journal or "portfolio" for that, nor to renegotiate rights. Just deposit all articles in OA Institutional Repositories, free for all.

And the PostGutenberg "glue" to keep a corpus from getting fragmented is metadata tags, not a shared spatial locus (nor the glue in the binding of a single shared journal locus).

Lynch: "Again, this connects to the theme of the overall integrity of the scholarly record, and our need to be able to manage this record at scale."

The scholarly record will now be distributed across a worldwide network of interoperable Institutional Repositories. Articles and data will be the principal items of interest; and the journal they were peer-reviewed and accepted by will simply be certified by one of their metadata tags (but a critically important tag).

Lynch: "3. We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies"

Here Cliff rightly calls into question whether the other "good works" of Scholarly Societies should continue to be subsidised by authors' lost research impact. The answer, of course, is No; and that will become clear to all once it is discussed openly.

But, again, what is at issue is not cajoling or coercing publishers -- whether Scholarly-Society, commercial or otherwise -- to convert to Gold. (It would be helpful if they endorsed immediate Green, but even that is only desirable, but not necessary in advance.) The issue is research institutions and funders mandating Green OA. Scholarly Societies simply risk baring their blatant conflict of interest with their own membership (researchers) if they venture to oppose mandating Green OA.

Lynch: "their journals typically are viewed as offering high quality at reasonable cost, and there's no reason that they shouldn't continue to be highly competitive if one moves away from a reader-pays model."

No special need to talk to Scholarly Societies if one is not proposing to "move away" from any model but merely mandating self-archiving (with or without publisher endorsement). (And, to repeat, OA is not solely, or primarily about OA Gold: it is about OA. No need to "move way from models": just to move fingers to keyboard so as to deposit articles...)

Lynch: "4. We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing"

This recommendation too, is far too focussed on OA Gold and its speculative economics, rather than just plain old vanilla OA.

What "we" need to do right now is to forget about affordability and to mandate OA self-archiving. And to move our fingers to the keyboard, to get going on the depositing...

Lynch: "One takes the operating budget or historic revenue stream of a given journal and divides by the number of articles published or submitted, and announces the per-published-article cost (or submitted-article-cost, if one uses that model) for an open access journal."

It is certainly true that this is an extremely arbitrary way of setting the asking price for OA Gold publishing. The only essential component of that current price is the cost of implementing peer review, which is somewhere between $50 and $500 per article.

But there is no earthly reason we should still be fussing about that now at all. It's already late in the day. Time to forget about Gold Fever and get the fingers moving, to provide immediate OA...

Lynch: "Perhaps the system needs to be redesigned to deliver a price point per article that we can afford. Suppose we redesigned journal publishing with the goal of $100 per article published?"

Pick your price, but this is all just notional designing of notional solutions in the skyways of speculation: Pre-emptive OA Gold.

The actual solution requires no guesstimating or publishing reform, voluntary or coerced, nor this interminable waiting and speculation: It just requires that researchers' institutions and funders mandate OA self-archiving, now.

(And who are "We"? We are the research community: We can mandate self-archiving by and for ourselves. We can move our fingers to provide the OA. But we can't redesign journal publishing. And we don't need to. That's not what OA is about. OA is about providing OA. Gold is just one possible way to provide OA, and it's proving to be an extremely slow and uncertain way, spending far more time contemplating hypothetical economics than providing actual OA. And it can't be mandated. Green, in contrast, can and does provide immediate OA, is already beginning to be mandated, and is only waiting for the mandating to propagate to all research institutions and funders in order to provide at last the 100% OA we have been wait for for so long. And the mandates are on the way. Because they come from Us, the research community, the providers and users of the articles that we are seeking to make OA. No need to "redesign" anything but our digital kinematics -- and I don't mean financial or even cybernetic digits, but the dactyls at the beck and call of every one of us...)

But Cliff is back again, at the financial digits:

Lynch: "Or, if articles really must cost several thousand dollars each, and we are unwilling to deal with the implications or results of massively reducing costs, we need to explore what can we do to reduce the number of articles going into this costly system."

By now, we have long forgotten the immediate, pressing, solvable problem, which is OA, and we have launched back into the usual round of passive armchair speculations about the journal affordability problem and publishing reform...

Lynch: "similar questions can and should be asked about monograph publishing"

Yes, but let those similar questions and answers be kept separate from the problem at hand, which is OA, i.e., in the first instance, Open Access to the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer reviewed journals, every single one of which is and always has been an author give-away, written solely for the sake of usage and impact, not for the sake of earning royalty revenue. Not necessarily true of all monographs (though it might be true of some).

First things first. Let's require and reach 100% OA for OA's primary target, journal articles, and then contemplate the generalizability of our fabulous success to other forms of literature.

In the meantime, no one is stopping monograph authors (or their fingers) from making their books OA too, if they so wish, and if their publishers can afford to publish them anyway. But let us not contemplate mandating that sort of thing just yet!

Lynch: "5. Open Access Is Not a Threat to Peer Review: In Fact, It Has Nothing to Do with Peer Review -- but It Is Also Time to Talk about Peer Review"

Yes, it is not a threat. Yes, it has nothing to do with it. And no, OA is not the context to talk about peer review. (If this is the time, then it should be talked about separately, elsewhere; nothing to do with OA.)

Lynch: "The economic model underlying a journal has nothing to do with its peer review policy -- or its quality. There are many online journals that practice rigorous peer review. Indeed, going beyond just peer review, there seems to be no correlation between journal cost and quality."

These truisms are worth repeating, since so many still fail to grasp them.

But Cliff raises them misleadingly: OA is not the same thing as Gold OA. The peer-review issue is not just raised as a question about the quality standards of Gold OA journals. It is also raised by some publishers who keep proclaiming willy-nilly the doomsday scenario that mandating Green OA self-archiving will destroy journals and peer review. That is the empty alarmism that needs to be exposed for what it really is:

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Lynch: "At the same time -- and having just emphasized the complete disconnect between open access and peer review, I almost hate to mention this for fear of adding to the confusion -- we are long overdue for a nuanced analysis and reevaluation of peer review practices in scholarly publishing as an entirely separate issue from open access."

Don't mention it! (In this context.)

It is indeed irrelevant to OA and only adds confusion to confusion, and delay and indecision to what has already been near-paralysis for far too long...

Lynch: "We need to understand the extent of these costs and their implications."

The costs of peer review alone can be vaguely estimated now, and have been. But the only way to determine the true costs of peer review alone (once all other obsolescent publishing functions have been jettisoned [like print] or offloaded [like online access-provision and archiving] onto the distributed network of OA IRs) is to mandate Green and then let nature take its course in the online era.

(Don't ask me why nature couldn't take its course without the help of mandates, when 34,000 researchers happily perform the requisite keystrokes to sign a threat to boycott their journals if they do not provide OA, but it never occurs to them to go ahead and do the keystrokes to provide the OA for themselves! Or when university provosts perform the keystrokes in droves to sign in support of a federal federal proposal to mandate the keystrokes of self-archiving, but it never occurs to them to adopt a keystroke mandate at their own local institutions already, instead of sitting on their hands waiting for the federal mandate! I don't know the answer. It's a paradox, a koan, and I've dubbed it Zeno's Paralysis. But the affliction is curable, by mandates, freely applied to the research community's body politick.)

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.

Lynch: "6. Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity."

By all means, let those who wish to reform the scholarly publishing system so as to better serve the academy so declare their intentions and proceed full-speed with their worthy agenda.

But let those who merely wish to maximise online access to a very specific subset of scholarly publications (peer-reviewed research articles), right now, proceed toward their specific, distinct, immediately reachable and already woefully overdue goal (OA) without being hamstrung by any other admirable but irrelevant agendas.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: There are many things that are delaying the onset of the optimal and inevitable outcome for research in the online age (100% Open Access). Among them is over-reaching: 100% OA is already within our reach; we need merely grasp it, by mandating self-archiving. But if we insist instead on holding out for something beyond our immediate grasp -- OA + "X" (such as copyright reform, data-archiving, publication reform) -- then we simply keep delaying the optimal and inevitable, gaining next to nothing for our pains. Chris Armbruster hopes the February meeting of the European Commission on Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age will reach for radical copyright reform rather than grasping immediate Open Access by mandating self-archiving. Let us hope this will not turn into yet another meeting that misses the opportunity to reach the optimal and inevitable at last. All other good things will follow, but not it we insist they come first.

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Chris Armbruster seems to be a well-meaning supporter of OA + X (i.e., Open Access plus something else, "X," where in this case X seems to be: copyright reform, publishing innovation, and data-archiving).

The problem with well-meaning supporters of OA + X invariably arises when X gets in the way of OA. For then, support for OA + X becomes opposition to OA - X (especially when "X" turns out to be a bigger, more complicated, slower, vaguer or less certain agenda than OA itself).

But OA -- already long overdue, and now at last moving toward success via OA self-archiving mandates -- is not helped, at this point, by opponents of OA - X.

I reply to Chris Armbruster below, suggesting that with a little patience, he may find that the likelihood of the "X" he desires (copyright reform, publishing innovation and data-archiving) will be greatly enhanced by OA itself, and OA itself, 100% OA, is now within practical reach, via self-archiving and self-archiving mandates. It is unhelpful in the extreme to urge not grasping 100% OA at this point, and holding out instead for "X."

Failing to grasp the OA that is within reach already has a long history, alas (over a decade now), and the fallacy has a name -- "Zeno's Paralysis" -- and a long list of instances, which well-meaning supporters of OA + X would do well to consult, so as not to help history to repeat itself, inadvertently.

A point-by-point reply to Chris Armbruster (CA) follows:

CA:
"OA to Research Articles and Data Should Be Used To Foster Innovation for the Sake of the European Areas of Research and ofHigher Education"

OA (to research articles, as defined) first has to be reached, before it can help foster data-archiving and innovation. OA is now within reach, via self-archiving, mandated by research institutions and funders, now spreading worldwide. Let us speak about using OA to foster data-archiving and innovation once we have OA, rather than continuing to hold OA at arm's length any longer, for any reason.

(Research, and OA to research, by the way, are global, interdigitating matters, not European ones; all research benefits, reciprocally, from OA, not just European research.)

CA: "The programme of the European Commission Conference: Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area - Brussels, 15-16 February 2007 includes speakers from the publishing industry such as Reed Elsevier and Springer, but it is clear that the proponents of Open Access are having their day in Brussels (on top of this - from Springer it is Jan Velterop). This vindicates those that read the outcome of the earlier study as an unequivocal support of OA, at least among the authors of the study and - presumably - among those in DG Research that commissioned the study."

Let us hope it is so. Now why is an OA supporter, like Chris Armbruster, not happy about this?

CA: "Yet, it is far from certain that the conference will become a milestone on the way to OA. For the OA movement may be heading into a dead end. It is worrying to see the widespread incapacity to understand the importance of unblocking innovative capacities in scientific publishing, scholarly communication and access to data."

The immediate objective is OA, and 100% OA will contribute immeasurably to "unblocking innovative capacities in scientific publishing, scholarly communication and access to data." Blocking or delaying immediate OA will not.

CA: "And here is the problem with the prior study of scientific publishing in Europe, with the so-called green road to access and with the new approach of Science Commons. The study by Dewatripont et al failed to address the issue of copyright and thus missed the importance of shifting the dissemination of research articles AND data from an IPR to nonexclusive licensing."

The objective of the OA movement is OA. Copyright is addressed to the extent that it is pertinent to OA. Nonexclusive licensing of articles AND data is welcome and desirable, but it is not a precondition for OA, and insisting on it as a prerequisite for OA simply places further needless obstacles in the path of OA.

Self-archiving mandates require researchers to deposit their articles in their Institutional (or Central) Repositories. For the articles that are published in the 69% of journals that have already endorsed immediate OA self-archiving, access to the deposited article can be set to Open Access immediately upon acceptance for publication.

For the remaining 31%, access can be provisionally set to Closed Access during any allowed embargo interval, during which all research usage needs can be fulfilled via the semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT button, whereby individual users, seeing the deposited article's globally accessible metadata, click to request an individual copy from the author via email, and the author can authorise the emailing via one click. That's not yet OA, but a close functional approximation, and will be followed by OA quite naturally once mandated depositing approaches 100% globally.

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Hence, no need to await successful negotiation of nonexclusive licensing in order to self-archive, or mandate self-archiving, right now.

CA: "Many proponents of green OA seem to brazenly assume that they can go on self-archiving post-prints without paying attention to copyright"

Please see above.

CA: "At some point in the future (when OA pressure has abated somewhat)"

Why would it be imagined that OA pressure will abate rather than grow, as OA grows? Enjoying the benefits of OA will only increase the desire for and dependence upon OA by research and researchers, as well as their institutions and funders (the ones who mandate it), worldwide.

CA: "publishers will ask their authors to remove all openly accessible copies of the research article, word-wide, from all servers."

This is being hypothesised here rather confidently a-priori on the basis of a subjective impression. The objective probabilities are look rather the opposite.

CA: "Publishers are not to be blamed - for as long as their business model of regarding research articles and data as 'property' is accepted by researchers, universities and research funders. Shareholders have every right to insist that publishers maximise profits from the property that they have acquired."

On present evidence, publishers are to be praised, not blamed, for 93% of journals have already endorsed some form of self-archiving. There is also zero evidence to date that self-archiving causes cancellations. And even if it ever does, publishing can and will adapt. It is quite clear that maximising research usage and impact -- for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders, and for the tax-paying public that funds the funders and institutions, and for whose benefit the research is conducted -- takes precedence over insuring publishers' current revenues streams and current cost-recovery methods. Publishing can and will adapt; it will not be able to deny research the benefits of OA.

CA: "That Science Commons should now also be advocating self-archiving is unbelievable."

On the contrary, it is quite sensible and welcome that Science Commons should recognise that access is the end and CC-licensing is merely one of the means:

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

"Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons" (Jun 2004)

"Open Access Data Archiving: A Complement to Article-Archiving" (Mar 2005)

CA: "It is no comfort that SC provides "author addenda" for copyright transfer contracts by which the author retains the right to self-archive. This is nonsense because it effectively legitimates the mistaken idea that the future of scientific publishing and data management should continue to be one in which the publishing house will own the IPR to the article."

No, Chris, it moots it, once one realizes that all the usage capabilities that researchers need already come with the (free, online) territory once the full-text is made freely accessible to all online:

All the usage rights that researchers and research harvesters need for full-text journal-article content come with the free online territory (including linking, downloading, viewing, storing locally, printing-off locally, and data-crunching).

Other "re-use" rights are neither part of, nor needed for, OA (e.g., republishing or redistributing online or on paper).

CC licenses are useful, desirable and welcome -- but not necessary for OA, and a deterrent to OA if needlessly insisted upon as an extra precondition.

CA: "The green road to OA and the Science Commons "author addenda" are not in the best interest of researchers and universities."

Does this mean that not self-archiving research, free for all online, is in the best interest of researchers and universities? (OA - X is bad? It should be deferred until/unless we can have OA + X?)

CA: "They are certainly detrimental to the interest of higher education institutions and their students."

It is bad for students to have free online access to the research output of higher education institutions?

CA: "And they are ruinous to the economic future of Europe."

Protecting the current revenue streams and cost-recovery models of journal publishers is more important for the economic future of Europe than maximising the usage, uptake, applications and impact of European research output (i.e., maximising research progress and productivity)?

CA: "Here is why: Given the expansion of research, the rise of the internet, the acceleration of innovation and the increasing importance of knowledge-based industry and services it is imperative that access to scientific knowledge (in the form of research articles and data that have been publicly funded and/or have been produced not-for-profit) be unrestricted and seamless."

Is that not precisely what OA provides? And is that not precisely why self-archiving is to be mandated?

CA: "This would not only increase the quality of research (ease of peer review, availability of results, transparency of knowledge claims), it would also unblock the market for the creative emergence of new services to readers and authors."

Note that all these benefits, on which there is full agreement with Chris, are benefits of OA, not of X. Yet it is against OA that Chris argues when he argues against OA - X.

CA: "Given the large number of knowledge claims, the enormous amount of publications in circulation and the requirement to handle ever more complex data, we urgently need services that help readers (be they researchers, students or companies) organize their activities more effectively and efficiently."

What we need most urgently is the 80-85% of annual research output that is not yet OA to be made OA. Self-archiving mandates will generate this.

Yes, search and navigation services on this growing OA database can and will become ever more powerful as the OA database grows. But what is missing now is not the overlay services, but the OA content itself.

CA: "The challenge to the European Commission is not to take sides for or against OA."

Isn't it? If immediate OA is reachable via mandated self-archiving, and its benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public are substantial, should the European Commission not take sides in the conflict of interest between those benefits and the risks to the current revenue streams and cost-recovery models of research publishers, in deciding whether or not to mandate OA self-archiving?

Houghton, J., Steele, C. & Sheehan, P. (2006) Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits. Research Communication Costa in Australia: Emerging Opportinities and Benefits. A report to the Department of Education, Science and Training.

Houghton, J. & Sheehan, P. (2006) The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings. Centre for Strategic Economic Studies Victoria University.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).

Harnad, S. (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16).

Harnad, S. (2005) Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research.

Harnad, Stevan (2005) Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on its Research Investment. In Steele, Colin, Ed. Proceedings, National Scholarly Communications Forum 2005, Sydney, Australia.

CA: "It is to understand what legal, economic and technical regime would be best for the quality of research in the ERA, for the quality of higher education in the EHEA and for the economic prosperity of Europe as a whole."

This "X" sounds rather abstract, vague, and general. Mandating OA self-archiving in order to maximise European research access and impact, in contrast, is concrete, specific, practical, testable, tested, has been demonstrated to be both implementable and successful, and has already been sporadically implemented in the UK, Switzerland, Portugal, Australia, and India, with proposals pending in the US and Europe. It is time to implement it systematically in Europe, for the sake of OA.

Let us hope that the Brussels meeting will not instead be distracted by "X."

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In "Scale and scalability," Jan Velterop writes:

"self-archiving is... not scalable. As long as... only a small number of authors... [self-archive] anarchically and unpredictably, it will work... [But] [t]ake the anarchy and unpredictability out of it... via self-archiving mandates – and... [n]o publisher... could afford to allow authors to self-archive... and ‘green’ would fade out of existence."

Individual journals making 100% of their own contents Open Access (OA) (gold), all at once, and all in one place, right now, is indeed likely to cause cancellations.

But individual authors making their own articles OA (green) by self-archiving them in their own Institutional Repositories, anarchically and distributedly, does not provide 100% of the contents of any individual journal, and its extent and growth rate is hard to ascertain. (In other words, individual mandates are just as anarchic as individual self-archiving with respect to the contents of any individual journal.)

Hence self-archiving is unlikely to cause journal cancellations until the self-archiving of all articles in all journals is reliably at or near 100%. If/when that happens, or is clearly approaching, journals can and will scale down to become peer-review service providers only, recovering their much reduced costs on the OA model that Jan favors. But journals are extremely unlikely to want to do that scaling down and conversion now, when there is no pressure to do it. And there is certainly no reason for researchers to sit waiting meanwhile, as they keep losing access, usage and impact. Mandates will pressure researchers to self-archive, and, eventually, 100% self-archiving might also pressure journals to scale down and convert to the model Jan advocates.

Right now, however, journals are all still making ends meet through subscriptions, whereas (non-self-archiving) researchers are all still losing about half their potential daily usage and impact, cumulatively. The immediate priority for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders is hence obvious, and it is certainly not to pay their journals' current asking-price for making each individual article OA, over and above paying for subscriptions: It is to make their own individual articles OA, right now, by self-archiving them, and to pay for peer review only if and when journals have minimized costs by scaling down to the essentials in the OA era if/when there is no longer any sustainable way of recovering those costs via subscriptions.

(By that time, of course, subscription cancellation savings will have become available to pay those reduced costs up-front. Today they are not; and double-paying up front would be pure folly.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The notion of an "Overlay Journal" often unwittingly confuses (1) access-provision with peer-review service-provision, (2) pre-peer-review preprints with peer-reviewed postprints (or posting with publishing), (3) archives (repositories) with journals, or (4) Central Archives/Repositories (CRs) in particular with distributed Institutional Repositories (IRs) in general. Throughout the evolution of research communication -- from On-Paper to On-Line to Open Access -- peer review remains peer review, a journal remains a journal (i.e., a peer-review service-provider and certifier), and texts tagged as "published" by journal X remain texts tagged as published by journal X. All that changes is the access-medium and the degree of accessibility. (And possibly, one day, the cost-recovery model.)

---

The notion of an "Overlay Journal" is and always has been somewhat inchoate -- potentially even incoherent, if construed in a way that conflates (1) access-provision with peer-review service-provision, (2) pre-peer-review preprints with peer-reviewed postprints (or posting with publishing), (3) archives (repositories) with journals, or (4) Central Archives/Repositories (CRs) in particular with distributed Institutional Repositories (IRs) in general.

(1) Access-Provision vs. Peer-Review Service-Provision. A research journal is and always has been both (i) an access-provider (producing, printing and distributing the print edition; producing and licensing the online edition) and (ii) a quality-control service-provider (implementing and certifying the peer review process -- but with the peers independent and refereeing for the journals for free). In the Open Access (OA) era, the access-provider functions of the research journal can and will be supplemented by author self-archiving of the final, revised, peer-reviewed postprint (in the author's own IR and/or a CR) in order to ensure that all would-be users have access, rather than only those whose institutions can afford access to the journal's subscription-based version.

It is also possible -- but this is hypothetical and it is not yet known whether and when it will happen -- that the distributed network of IRs and CRs containing authors' self-archived postprints may eventually substitute for the traditional access-provision function of journals (i), at least insofar as online access is concerned. This does not mean that IRs and CRs become journals. It just means that the online access-provision function (i) is unbundled from the former double function of journals (i, ii), and offloaded onto the IR/CR network. And this is merely hypothetical at this time. Only the supplementary function is a reality today, not yet the substitute function. (Is this hypothetical outcome what is meant by "Overlay Journals"? If so, let's forget about them for now and work on reaching 100% OA self-archiving, crossing our "overlay" bridges only if/when we ever get to them.)

(2) Unrefereed Preprints vs. Refereed Postprints (Posting vs. Publishing). Authors self-archive both their pre-peer-review preprints and their peer-reviewed postprints in IRs and CRs, but the primary target of the OA movement, and of OA self-archiving mandates, is the peer-reviewed postprint (of all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals). Self-archiving preprints (usually done in order to elicit informal peer feedback and to assert priority) is neither publication nor a substitute for publication. To post a preprint in an IR or CR is not to publish it; it is merely to provide access to it. In providing access to preprints, IRs and CRs are certainly not substituting for journals. (Preprints are not listed in academic CVs as "Publications" but as "Unpublished Manuscripts.")

(3) Archives (Repositories) vs. Journals. IRs and CRs are not themselves journals, nor even part-journals. They cannot and do not provide peer review, or certify its outcome. If an author's own IR were to try to do this, for its own research output, it would become an in-house vanity press, not a peer-reviewed journal. If a CR tried to do this, it would simply become a new journal start-up (competing with existing journals). Right now, IRs and CRs are merely access-providers -- providing access to both unpublished preprints and journal-published, -peer-reviewed, and -certified postprints.

(4) Central Archives/Repositories (CRs) vs. Distributed Institutional Repositories (IRs). CRs and IRs also differ in that CRs are few, and do not exist for all or most fields, whereas IRs are many and cover all fields. CRs are independent 3rd parties, not affiliated with, beholden to, or sharing common interests with the authors who deposit in them, whereas IRs are authors' own institutional showcases, sharing with their authors a joint interest in maximizing the visibility, usage, impact and prestige of their research findings. IRs are hence not eligible for undertaking the independent, neutral, 3rd-party quality-control function of journals. CRs, in contrast, are in principle eligible to become journals (just as any online entity today is), but if they do so, they do it in competition with the 24,000 existing journals, just as any new start-up journal does. Moreover, although CRs may already host preprints, those preprints are currently all destined for submission to established journals today; and those same CRs also host the postprints that result from the peer-review service provided by those journals. Hence CRs in no way substitute for that peer-review service-provision (ii) today.

So what is an "Overlay Journal"? The idea arose (incoherently, almost like an Escher drawing of an impossible staircase) from the idea that journals could simply "overlay" their peer-review functions on the self-archived preprint. The idea was first mooted in connection with a CR (Arxiv), but it was never coherently spelled out.

(I will not be discussing here any of the speculations about "overlay" and "disaggregated" and "deconstructed" journals that are based on untested notions about scrapping peer review altogether, or replacing it with open peer commentary; nor will I be discussing far-fetched notions of "multiple-review/multiple-publication" (in which it is imagined that peer review is just a static accept/reject matter, like a connotea tag, and that papers can be multiply "published" by several different journals, taking no account of the fact that referees are already a scarce and over-used resource, nor of the fact that peer review depends on answerability and revision): These conjectures are all fine as possible supplements to peer review, but none has yet been shown to be a viable substitute for it. The notion of an "Overlay Journal" is accordingly only assessed here in the context of standard peer review, as it is practised today by virtually all of the 24,000 journals whose peer-reviewed content is the target of the OA movement.)

One rather trivial construal of "Overlay Journal" (not the intended interpretation) would be that instead of submitting preprints to journals, authors could deposit them in CRs (or IRs) and simply send the deposit's URL to the journal, to retrieve it from there, for peer-review. This would not make the journal an "Overlay" on the CR or IR; it would simply provide a more efficient means of submitting papers to journals (and this has indeed been adopted as an optional means of submission by several physics journals, just as the submission of digital drafts instead of hard copy, and submission via email instead of by mail has been quite naturally adopted, to speed and streamline submission and processing by most journals, in the digital era).

So submitting preprints to journals via IRs or CRs is not tantamount to making the IR or CR into an underlay for "Overlay Journals," nor to making journals into overlays for the IR or CR. (In the case of IRs, because the authorship of most journals is distributed across many institutions, depositing in IRs would have meant "Distributed-Overlay Journals" in any case, but let us not puzzle about what sort of an entity those might have been!)

What might be meant by an "Overlay Journal" in something other than this trivial optional-means-of-submission sense, then? Could the users of the term mean the hypothetical outcome contemplated earlier (1), with journals offloading their former access-provision function (i) onto the IR/CR network and downsizing to become just peer-review service-providers (ii)? Possibly, but at the moment journals don't seem to be inclined to do so, and if they did, it is likely that they would prefer to continue to be thought of as what they have always been: journals, with a name and an imprimatur. Paper journals were not "overlays" on libraries. Journals that abandon their print edition are still journals, not "overlays" on their electronic edition. If their electronic edition is jettisoned too, they're still journals, not "overlays" on IRs/CRs.

Once we recognise that access-provision (i) (whether on-paper or online) was always just an incidental, media-dependent function of peer-reviewed research journals, whereas peer-review service-provision and certification (ii) was always their essential function, then it becomes clear that -- medium-independently -- a journal was always just a peer-review service-provider and certifier of a paper's having successfully met its established quality standards: It has always provided a quality-control tag, -- the journal name -- affixed to a text, whether the text is on-paper on a bookshelf, in the journal's proprietary on-line archive, or in an OA IR or CR. In this very general sense, all journals already are (and always have been) "overlay journals": overlays over all these various media for storing and providing access to the papers resulting from having passed successfully through the journal's peer review procedure (which is not itself a static tagging exercise, but a dynamic, interactive, feedback-correction-and-revision process, answerable to the referees and editors).

In other words, throughout the evolution of research communication -- from On-Paper to On-Line to Open Access -- peer review remains peer review, a journal remains a journal (i.e., a peer-review service-provider and certifier), and texts tagged as "published" by "journal X" remain texts tagged as published by "journal X." All that changes is the access-medium and the degree of accessibility. (And possibly, one day, the cost-recovery model.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On the premise that the Article Accessibility problem is solved, there is no longer any Journal Affordability problem left. Let us suppose (and hope) that researchers' institutions and funders soon mandate, at long last, that their employees/fundees (or their assigns) do the pathetically small number of keystrokes it takes to self-archive all their final, peer-reviewed drafts in their own Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That will generate 100% Open Access (OA).

Once it is no longer true that any would-be user is unable to access an article because his institution cannot afford the journal in which it happens to have been published, there is no longer any Accessibility Problem. Librarians' annual agony over which journals to keep and which to cancel within the constraints of their finite serials budgets (never anywhere near enough to afford all published journals) will be over. They can purchase as many as they can afford from among those journals for which their users indicate that they would still quite like to have them in-house (whether out of desire for the paper edition or for online add-ons, or out of habit, sentimentality, loyalty, civic-mindedness or superstition): Nothing important hinges on the choice or the outcome once it is sure that no potential user is any longer doing without (hence no research or researcher is any longer needlessly losing impact because of access denial).

To ever have thought otherwise is simply to have conflated the Accessibility and Affordability problems: Accessibility was always what made Affordability a problem at all.

And before the inevitable, tedious question is asked about how the essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing will continue to be covered if/when subscriptions become unsustainable, please consult the prophets.

(Publishing will adapt, cutting the costs of the inessentials, downsizing to the essentials, possibly right down to peer-review service-provision alone; those irreducible essential costs will then be covered on the OA cost-recovery model, out of a fraction of the annual institutional windfall savings from the institutional journal cancellations. Till that income stream is released, however, OA Publishing is OA-Publicatio Praecox...)

Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/

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SUMMARY: Jean-Claude Guédon [J-CG] has suggested that (1) the percentage of non-OA journals that are subsidised may be closer to 50% than 5%, and that hence (2) OA self-archiving mandates could also mandate the conversion of those subsidised journals to OA. It is not clear, however, (i) whether the percentage of national journals that are subsidised is representative of the total percentage of the world's 24,000 journals that are subsidised. The right question is: (ii) what percentage of a nation's research output is published in subsidised journals? A second, unavoidable question is: (iii) where in the quality hierarchy of 24,000 peer-reviewed journals do the subsidised journals tend to fall? (The answer to (ii) and (iii) will differ by both nation and discipline.) In any case, the adoption of the proposed OA self-archiving mandates (such as the US FRPAA proposal or the European Commission's A1 recommendation) should on no account be handicapped by trying to add to them a mandate to convert subsidised journals to OA. The same is true of individual institutional self-archiving mandates. The efforts to convert subsidised journals to OA should proceed separately, in parallel. Once self-archiving mandates prevail, the need to convert journals to OA will in any case become a far less urgent one, and no longer an OA matter. (Kimmo Kuusela has provided some helpful data for Finland.)

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On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Jean-Claude Guédon [J-CG] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

J-CG: "Samples available certainly place the [proportion of journals that are subsidised at] closer to 50% than to 5%."

I am afraid I'm still not sure that's accurate (or if so, what it means).

If it were really true that half of the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals are subsidised, it would be important to know which half -- top or bottom? This is not snobbery: The need for OA is definitely top-down insofar as the user-end need for access is concerned. What users need first and foremost is access to the articles in the best journals.

And on the author-end, although all authors yearn for more impact, the findings are that the size of the OA Advantage is greater for the higher quality articles (the "Quality Advantage," QA) in that the proportion of self-archived articles is higher in the higher citation brackets. (This is the effect that some have interpreted -- wrongly, in my opinion, -- as a non-causal Self-Selection effect, or Quality Bias, QB, rather than QA. There is both a noncausal QB and a causal QA component in the OA advantage, and I am betting QA is the bigger component). The majority of articles are not cited at all, and for the worst of them, making them OA does not help! OA allows the best work -- the work destined to be used and built upon -- to be used fully, and to be built upon purely on the basis of its quality and relevance, no longer limited by its affordability (hence accessibility).

Even if half of a country's national journals are subsidised, it does not follow that half of that country's research output is published in its national journals, let alone subsidised journals. (And that's without even asking which half.)

J-CG: "I am not sure one can compare hypothetical... money that might have been earned... with actual cash outlay [in pitting money actually spent on subsidising journals against the hypothetical monetary value of lost potential research impact]."

I'm afraid that here I disagree very fundamentally: Although the serials crisis definitely helped alert us to the OA problem, historically, OA is not in fact about saving money spent on journals -- neither the money spent on subscribing to overpriced journals nor the money spent subsidising journals. It is about ending the needless loss of potential research access and impact. And the estimates of the amount of money lost because of that access denial are the real measures of the cost of not providing OA. Neither journal prices nor journal subsidies are measures of that real, preventable loss to research progress and productivity.

J-CG: "Every sample examined so far, outside the US, UK and Australia, shows levels of subsidies that go from significant to almost total. Why play skeptical on this issue? "

I am still skeptical because my question about proportion of journals subsidised was not about what proportion of a country's national journals are subsidised, but about what percentage of that country's research output is published in subsidised journals (by discipline -- and, to get an even better idea: by quality-bracket).

J-CG: "Side by side, mandating self-archiving and pushing, perhaps even mandating, the conversion of subsidized journals to OA would help reach OA faster."

In my opinion, complicating and handicapping the (still not yet adopted) self-archiving mandate proposals with journal-conversion mandates at this time would make it harder, not easier, to get the self-archiving mandates adopted at all -- especially because it would couple mandates with funding commitments. Moreover, until the question of the true proportion of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (by discipline, as well as their standing in the quality hierarchy) is answered, it is not even clear what marginal gains in OA are to be expected from trying to convert subsidised journals to OA.

There is nothing wrong with continuing efforts to convert non-OA journals into OA journals, including the subsidised non-OA journals, but I do not think this should be conflated or combined with the efforts to get the OA self-archiving mandates adopted. (And, to repeat, once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned. It reverts to just being a matter of the evolution of journal publishing: No more access/impact problem making it seem urgent -- though I do think that reaching 100% OA through self-archiving mandates is likely to accelerate journal reform too.)

J-CG: "Many journals of a "national" reach... tend not to appear in [Ulrich's or ISI]"

The question still stands: What percentage of those journals is subsidised?

And there is a second question: Would it help or handicap the prospects of adoption for OA self-archiving mandates to try to add subsidised-journal-conversion clauses to them? Mandates are adopted by research institutions and funders and applied to the research output of their employees and fundees. Subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would be addressed to an entirely different constituency. Moreover, OA self-archiving mandates would already cover all the contents of all journals, subsidised or unsubsidised.

J-CG: "in the social sciences and the humanities... top-down distinctions are much more difficult to establish."

No doubt. But the percentage of research output in subsidised journals should be much less difficult (than that) to establish.

J-CG: "how does one determine if a Finnish journal on Finnish literature, published in Finnish, is inferior or superior to a Dutch journal on Dutch literature, written in Dutch?"

No need to compare Finnish journals to Dutch journals. Just Finnish research output in subsidised journals to total Finnish research output. (If there is a way to estimate relative quality, that would be helpful too, as would separate tallies by discipline.)

J-CG: "If impact factors do not work well as tools to rank journals, how does one go about deciding what is top and what is down?"

There are other ways to rank journals, but point taken: Where quality ranking is unavailable, percentage of research published in subsidised journals, by discipline, without a quality estimate, will do.

J-CG: "in each discipline... the pecking order is there, but... not always clearly visible [from] SCI or Ulrich's."

Then use the pecking order, not SCI, to estimate the relative quality of subsidised and unsubsidised journals. (Ulrich's does not rank.)

J-CG: "Stevan's disbelief in the significant reality of subsidized scholarly journals..."

It seems reasonable to ask for percentages, by discipline, in order to weigh the significance of this reality.

J-CG: "In the debates with opponents to OA... estimates of lost money because of access denial... [have] never gained much traction..."

The traction of the access/impact argument is not meant to be with the opponents of OA, but with the beneficiaries of OA (and of access/impact), namely, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders (for the sake of research usage/impact, productivity, progress).

The potential mandator of OA self-archiving is the research community itself -- research funders and institutions -- not the publishers who oppose OA.

Lost subscription money is a matter of concern to publishers, and shortage of subscription money is a matter of concern to librarians, but the former are unwilling and the latter unable to mandate either OA self-archiving or conversion to OA publishing.

Hence the traction for OA needs to be with research institutions and funders. Any potential traction from subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would depend entirely on the percentage of subsidised journals and the willingness of the subsidisers to mandate conversion. (But if access/impact loss had no traction with subsidisers, what would have traction? Why is subsidising non-OA journals bad, if not because of access/impact loss? "Monetising" access/impact loss is merely estimating how bad that access/impact loss is.)

J-CG: "These are two different, parallel strategies. The whole of the BOAI document was also very clear on this point."

BOAI was about OA, not about OA mandates. We've come a long way since December 2001...

SH: "once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned."

J-CG: "One could argue symmetrically that once all journals have turned OA, self-archiving is moot insofar as OA is concerned. So where does that leave us?"

It leaves us with one route (green) to 100% OA (self-archiving) that depends only on the research community itself -- the research providers and users, their institutions and funders -- and that can be 100% mandated.

And another route (gold) that depends on converting journals, hence on journal publishers, most of whom are not so inclined; and if conversion is mandatable at all, it is mandatable only for the subsidised journals, whose percentage and distribution in the quality hierarchy is not known (but unlikely to be very high).

In other words, one route (green) that, once mandated, is certain to deliver 100% OA, and another route (gold) that, even it can be mandated for some unknown percentage of journals, is likely to leave us waiting for 100% OA for a long, long time to come.

I'd go with the sure road.

Many thanks to Kimmo Kuusela for the prompt provision of data on Finland's research output, by discipline!

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Kimmo Kuusela wrote:
"I have compared Finnish research output in Finnish subsidised journals (that is, practically all Finnish journals) to total Finnish research output in 2005.
The results:
16% (2100) of the total number of articles (12839) in refereed journals were published in Finnish journals.
By field of education: Theology 5 %
The Humanities 49%
Art and Design 64%
Music 44%
Theatre and Dance 43%
Education 45%
Sport Sciences 0%
Social Sciences 47%
Psychology 16%
Health Sciences 31%
Law 77%
Economics 21%
Natural sciences 6%
Agriculture and Forestry 14%
Engineering 8%
Medicine 11%
Dentistry 18%
Veterinary Medicine 2%
Pharmacy 13%
Fine Arts 100%
Field of education unspecified 15% Here's a handy tool for even more calculations."

On the question of whether the proportion of national research output published in subsidised national journals is closer to 5% or 50%, the answer for Finland overall is closer to 5%; but looked at by discipline, for arts, humanities and social sciences it is closer to 50%. (The overall average is presumably 16% because of the lower relative proportion of articles in the arts, humanities and social sciences.)

"[T]he relative weight of each discipline in the category of refereed journal articles was as follows: Theology 0%
The Humanities 5%
Art and Design 0%
Music 0%
Theatre and Dance 0%
Education 3%
Sport Sciences 0%
Social Sciences 5%
Psychology 2%
Health Sciences 2%
Law 1%
Economics 4%
Natural sciences 21%
Agriculture and Forestry 2%
Engineering 13%
Medicine 31%
Dentistry 2%
Veterinary Medicine 1%
Pharmacy 1%
Fine Arts 0%
Field of education unspecified 5%The total output in 2005 was 24847 items, of which 7642 items (31%) were published domestically. Total output includes refereed articles, articles in compiled works or in printed conference publications, monographs (theses and dissertations excluded), and articles in universities' own serials (departmental serials excluded)."

On the basis of these data, if I were a Finnish researcher, institution or funder, I would hope that (1) all Finnish researchers would be required by their funders and institutions to self-archive all their refereed journal articles and that (2) all subsidised Finnish journals would be required by their subsiders to make their online editions open access.

I don't think trying to combine (1) and (2) into a single mandate would make much sense, since not only would the requirees -- researchers in (1), publishers in (2) -- not be the same in the two cases, but it is not even clear that the requirers -- research institutions and funders in (1), journal subsidisers in (2) -- would be the same either.

Hence it would be best if the two were pursued separately, in parallel. It is also worth noting that (1) would already moot (2), since 100% OA self-archiving would include the OA self-archiving of the subsidised 16% too! But I agree with Jean-Claude Guedon that this is no reason not to pursue the subsidised option (2) in parallel: just don't wrap (2) into (1) (at least not until (1) is adopted!).

It would be splendid if we could see data from other countries (along with their discipline data) along the lines Kimmo Kuusela has provided for Finland. (Arthur Sale has already made a stab for Australia, though I'll bet there are a few subsidised journals still lurking in the Aussie outback somewhere, possibly in the arts?)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: In two separate postings plus an article, Chris Armbruster [CA] has suggested that peer review provision should be unbundled from access provision and that authors (of journal articles) should not transfer exclusive copyright to publishers. The trouble is that although both desiderata are indeed desirable (and will no doubt prevail eventually), publishers are not particularly interested in unbundling today, and authors are not particularly interested in putting their accepted articles' publication at risk by haggling over copyright retention. Hence the immediate solution is, and remains, for authors to self-archive their accepted peer-reviewed drafts, and for their institutions and funders to mandate that they do so, for the good of research, researchers, and the public that funds them.

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CA: "The technology and economics of the internet mean that the marginal costs of disseminating research articles are decreasing rapidly. By comparison, the digital doubling of research articles by way of institutional repositories is cumbersome, time consuming and expensive. It needs to be mandated. And then policed: Why bother?"

Because converting journals to OA publishing requires the willingness of the journals to convert, and that willingness is not there (with good reason, as the experiment puts their current revenue streams at risk, and it is not at all clear yet whether the cost-recovery model will scale, and is sustainable at this time).

And because OA is for the benefit of research, researchers, and the public that funds them. It is by and for researchers that research is provided. So mandating self-archiving, by and for researchers, can and is being done, and it has already been demonstrated to work successfully. No "policing" necessary, just a formal mandate.

Sale, Arthur (2006) The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles. First Monday 11(10) October.

Sale, Arthur (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday 11(4) April

Nor is either self-archiving or the mandating of self-archiving cumbersome, time-consuming or expensive.

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.

What is cumbersome and time-consuming is waiting and trying to convert journals to OA publishing, one by one, instead of researchers just providing OA by and for themselves, now. And what is expensive is for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders, and their funders funders (the tax-paying public) to keep needlessly losing potential returns on their investment in research, in the form of research uptake, usage, applications, citations, productivity and progress.

And it is for the journals, not the researchers, that converting to OA publishing right now is risky and expensive. For if journals ever do eventually convert, then the institutional subscription cancellation savings will be more than enough to cover OA publication costs. It's just that journals will not take the risk of converting of their own accord right now, and they certainly cannot be mandated to do it. And as subscriptions are not yet being cancelled, there is no extra cash available to pay OA publishing costs.

(A self-archiving mandate for researchers might possibly set the cancellation process into motion, but that is not the objective of OA: The objective of OA is OA, and self-archiving mandates will already have provided OA irrespective of whether they eventually go on to generate cancellation pressure.)

CA: "[Some] OA advocates... think that they must either archive all the peer-reviewed journals again in OA (in which case national licenses, implemented worldwide, would surely be cheaper and quicker in converting research articles into a public good) "

It is not journals that are self-archived by authors, it is each author's own journal articles, in their own institutional repositories. That is the obvious and optimal way to supplement non-OA access with OA access for those would-be users who cannot afford the non-OA access. It is not a substitute for journal publishing.

National licenses are a non-starter: Not only would they be encouraging oligopoly, but they would be spending non-existent money (poached from research funds?) to pay for what is already being paid for via subscriptions today. What is needed now is OA, not a means of funding what is already funded. (If and when OA self-archiving should ever generate unsustainable cancellation pressure, then that will be the time to talk about redirecting funds from the windfall subscription savings to cover publication costs.)

CA: "or else clone the traditional journal online but charge the author"

The traditional journal is already cloned online (virtually all journals are hybrid today) and the only issue is, once again, conversion to OA publishing: Publishers cannot and need not be cloned or coerced into converting. If research, researchers, their institutions and their funders want and need OA so badly -- and they do -- then they need simply provide it for themselves, by mandating OA self-archiving.

CA: "Both solutions are neither creative nor adequate: they are fundamentally incompatible with the technology and economy of the internet. The WWW Galaxy means that dissemination is cheap and certification is expensive - a reversal of the premises of the Gutenberg Galaxy, in which peer review was cheap and printing costly."

Peers review for free and the cost of peer review has gone down, not up, in the PostGutenberg Galaxy (sic). But peer review is implemented by autonomous, answerable journals, with answerable track-records for quality. Apart from the Gutenberg-era function of text-generation and access-provision, now obsolescent, journals are merely peer-review service-providers and certifiers. But the demand for the journal's official paper and online editions has not yet subsided, so it is all wrapped in one non-OA product, paid for by subscription/licenses.

Unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get journals to convert to OA publishing (at a rate faster than the glacially slow rate at which they are converting now), it is better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe.

And unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get researchers to self-archive voluntarily, it is likewise better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe. (Theorizing about the severing of peer review from access-provision certainly won't do it!)

CA: "Surely, it is important to think through the consequences for open access to research articles? It seems amazing that OA advocates would go about re-erecting price barriers by ignoring the possibility of providing publishing services that are free to readers and authors -- like ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc."

(1) Arxiv, SSRN and RePec (and CogPrints, and Citeseer, and OAIster and Google Scholar) are not publishing services. (2) They are access-provision mechanisms. (3) That is the very same thing what author self-archiving in Institutional Repositories -- and institutional and funder mandates to do so -- amounts to. (4) And all those articles continue to be submitted to and published in peer-reviewed journals. Those are all supplements to -- not substitutes for -- journal publishing.

OA publishing is indeed a substitute for non-OA publishing, but not nearly enough publishers are doing it, and there's no way to mandate them to do it. And it would be absurd for the research community to wait until they decide to do it, since the research community can already mandate itself to provide OA today, by supplementing non-OA access with self-archived OA access, immediately.

I agree that author charges today are premature.

CA: "Indeed, how do we justify author charges of USD 1000, 2000 or even 3000 per article when there is positive proof that open access to research articles may be had for USD 1, 2 or 3 per article?"

No one needs to justify them: Those authors who can pay them, and wish to, should go ahead and pay them. Those who cannot, should self-archive (and their institutions and funders should mandate they do it, extending their existing publish-or-perish mandate to publish-and-self-archive, for the good of the research, researchers, their institutions, their funders and the public that funds them, and for whose benefit the research is being performed).

CA: "The WWW Galaxy heavily favours the severance of the certification of knowledge claims from the dissemination of research papers."

Separating peer review provision from access provision in the PostGutenberg Galaxy. So far, so good (though perhaps that should be from exclusive access provision).

CA: "Underlying this shift is the emergence of an academic cyberinfrastructure based on open transmission protocols and open-source software that, in turn, favours open content and open access."

To the extent that "knowledge claims" refers to new research findings, reported in peer-reviewed journals, what's new is the Internet, and the possibility of supplementing the existing ways of providing access to peer-reviewed research (viz, journal subscriptions) with new ways (viz, making a version freely accessible online).

CA: "'Openness' is fundamentally compatible with the knowledge-based economy if market profits are made from nonexclusive rights."

This is a bit too general, but if you mean nonexclusive rights to provide access, then that sounds fine (for peer-reviewed research).

CA: "The present conflict between scholars and commercial publishers around "open access" is based on a misunderstanding,"

The conflict is not particularly with commercial publishers alone, if we are talking about the same conflict, because noncommercial (learned society) publishers have been as vocal in their attempts to oppose or minimize OA as commercial publishers have been.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

But the real obstacle is not publishers (of either kind) at all: The obstacle is and always has been the inertia of the research community itself. (And the remedy for that inertia will be to extend the publish-or-perish mandate to: publish-and-provide-OA.)

CA: "for business models in scientific publishing that are based on the pursuit and enforcement of exclusive intellectual property rights will not persist because technological and economic conditions disfavour them strongly."

In "scientific publishing"? Does that include books, and textbooks? For if it's again just journal articles, then we are back to the one and the same special case (and it's not just science, but peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles too.).

CA: "The compatibility of open science and the knowledge-based economy may be enhanced if the dissemination of research articles is severed from their certification."

It is severed if it is the certified research that is disseminated, but if it is uncertified research, then it is hanging by a skyhook.

CA: "As the marginal cost of digital dissemination plummets, there is a case for the public funding of the electronic dissemination of research articles. Public funding could ensure effectively that dissemination is free to authors and readers - while reaping savings of several orders of magnitude as first copy costs in the WWW Galaxy fall to 1/10th or less of the cost in the Gutenberg Galaxy."

I couldn't quite follow: Certified (peer-reviewed) articles can be made available free on the web by their authors. Yes. But "first copy costs" are a print-run issue, and hence they are publisher matters, not author matters.

CA: "This is, however, not true for the certification of knowledge, especially by peer review, which is likely to become more costly if it is to be of any service to readers and authors."

Why more costly? The peers review for free. The journals implement the peer review, and the cost of that is covered out of subscription revenue from selling the paper edition and the publisher's online edition. "Non-exclusivity" merely requires that authors be able to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts accessible free online for those who cannot afford the publisher's version.

And if ever the institutional subscription demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition should fall to unsustainable levels, the cost of peer review can be covered out of the very same institutional windfall savings on subscription cancellations. And those costs are likely to be a lot lower than what is being spent on subscriptions now, because the hypothesis is that demand for the paper and publisher's online edition vanishes (and with it the associated costs).

CA: "On the assumption that the decoupling of certification and dissemination is desirable and likely, research articles should be disseminated with a nonexclusive copyright license. This does not require any changes in law, but merely a different contractual arrangement whereby certifiers (e.g. publishers, learned societies, institutional repositories and whatever new organisations might emerge) will not be able to claim an exclusive copyright."

Indeed. But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, because the demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition have not only not vanished, but they are paying the costs of peer review too. Whereas what is missing is OA! So what is needed now is not decoupling of certification and dissemination, but the self-archiving of the authors' peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints"). Nor should this self-archiving wait for the successful renegotiation of rights by authors. The postprints should immediately be deposited in their authors' Institutional Repositories (IRs) in any event.

CA: "Presently publishers collect monopoly rents because authors transfer the copyright of their papers to the publisher. If copyright for the article is no longer transferred exclusively, but licensed non-exclusively, then a competitive and efficient market for knowledge services will emerge."

Sixty-nine percent of journals have already given their green light to immediate author self-archiving. For the remaining 31%, the immediate-deposit/delayed-access mandate (plus the semi-automatic email-eprint-request button) is the solution. Copyright retention and nonexclusive licensing are a good idea where the author is willing and able to negotiate them, but they are not a prerequisite for providing free access today, and on no account should either self-archiving or self-archiving mandates wait for or be thought of or portrayed as being any way conditional upon the successful author negotiation of rights.

CA: "Economic modelling of the potential impact of the open access dissemination of research results is under way. In a first estimate it is valued at roughly $2bn for the UK, $3bn for Germany, $6bn for Japan and $16bn for the USA -- assuming a social return to R&D at 50% and a 5% increase in access and efficiency (Houghton and Sheehan 2006). This lends salience to the anticipation of the emergence and growth of a new knowledge industry around the certification of knowledge and the provision of services to readers and authors. This new industry will sit atop the open access dissemination of research articles and further contribute to growth and innovation."

I would say that the implications of those (and other) estimates of the economic benefits of OA are not implications for the publishing industry but for the research community and the public that funds them: They do not imply that publishing reform is the immediate priority today, but that providing OA is. And this can be done, and will be done, by self-archiving -- and by mandating self-archiving.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).

Harnad, S. (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16).

Harnad, S. (2005) Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research

Harnad, Stevan (2005) Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on its Research Investment. In Steele, Prof Colin, Eds. Proceedings National Scholarly Communications Forum 2005, Sydney, Australia.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

J.W.T.Smith (Templeton Library, University of Kent)
wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:
"My basic interpretation of the 'Harnad model' is that Stevan wants every researcher to locally (or remotely) make available an open copy... in parallel with the current journal model and [using] quality control services of existing journals. [This is] parasitic on the current model. What Stevan does not want to acknowledge is that this parasitism will ultimately destroy the current journal model... mandates (for self archiving) will not not only increase the number of research articles freely available (a good thing) but will also accelerate the end of the 'traditional' journal and force the evolution of a new form of academic publishing to replace it (in my opinion also a good thing...)."

Hypotheses non fingo. There is no "Harnad model":

      Research is published in c. 24K peer-reviewed journals (c. 2.5M articles annually).
            (Datum, not hypothesis.)
      Not all would-be users can access all those articles online.
             (Datum, not hypothesis.)
      Self-archiving supplements access, for those would-be users.
            (Datum, not hypothesis.)
      Self-archiving is correlated with higher and earlier download and citation impact.
            (Datum, not hypothesis.)
      Self-archiving is explicitly endorsed by 93% of journals.
            (Datum, not hypothesis.)
      Only c. 15% of annual articles are being spontaneously self-archived today.
            (Datum, not hypothesis)
      95% of researchers surveyed report they will self-archive if it is mandated.
            (Datum, not hypothesis.)
      When self-archiving is mandated, it rapidly rises toward 100%.
            (Datum, not hypothesis.)
       No evidence has been reported to date that self-archiving causes cancellations.
            (Datum, not hypothesis.)

[*Self-archiving might (or might not) eventually cause cancellations and a change in journal publishing model. (Hypothesis) Mea maxima culpa!]

Hypotheses non fingo. There is no "Harnad model."

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005)
Journal publishing and author self-archiving:
Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: There is undeniably a conflict of interest today between what is best for both the research community and the public that funds it, on the one hand, and what is best for the publishing community, on the other. Nor is there any doubt about how this conflict of interest can and will be resolved: Open Access. The only thing at issue is how long the optimal and inevitable can and will be delayed, and how to reach it as soon as possible.

---

In "More misinformation on repositories from ALPSP" Steve Hitchcock wrote:

['Romeo Green' publisher] policies [endorsing author self-archiving] have benefitted both publishers and repositories. [They] would not have been voluntarily adopted by publishers otherwise.'

Not quite: Many of the 94% of journals that are Romeo green (e.g., the APS and IOPP journals) became green because of Open Access (OA) self-archiving's demonstrated benefits to research, researchers and the public that funds them (doubled research usage and impact), not because self-archiving also enhances journal visibility and impact factors, hence might benefit journal sales or submissions. Let us not forget that although the PLoS petition, which threatened to boycott journals that did not provide OA, failed (because publishers were understandably unwilling to convert to an untested publishing model), the will of its 34,000 signatories was nevertheless noted, and green self-archiving policies were partly the result.

The will of the research community is still being (understandably) monitored by the publishing community. It is being noted that only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously, despite its demonstrated benefits. Research funders and institutions are now proposing to mandate self-archiving (just as they already mandate publishing itself), in order to maximize the benefits to researchers, their institutions, and the funding public. Publishers are trying to oppose those mandates, but again, there is ultimately no choice but to adapt to the will and interests of the research community (which includes researchers' employers and funders).

The problem is that publishers are also trying (rather ineptly) to manipulate that will, by misrepresenting the research community's interests, and that effort is bound to backfire sooner or later, to publishers' historic discredit. It is not only natural for the research community to 'put the interests of [its own] institution[s] and local community' first' but it is also in the interests of research productivity and progress, and the tax-paying public that funds them. Publishers would accordingly be far better advised to allow nature to take its course, toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, researchers and the public, and to prepare to adapt to it, rather than just trying to delay and waylay it. There is absolutely no doubt about which way any conflict of interest here (between the research community and the public on the one hand, and the publishing community on the other) will need to be resolved.

Best not to argue with the optimal and inevitable...

"Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society)"
"Evolving Publisher Copyright Policies On Self-Archiving" (2002)
"Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving" (2004)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: Jan Velterop (of Springer Open Choice) argues that the money being spent today on journal subscriptions needs to be "re-routed" to paying for Open Access journal publishing instead. If that is indeed a desirable outcome, then supporting the many actual and proposed Open Access self-archiving mandates worldwide today is the best way to facilitate that outcome. Meanwhile, it will also generate 100% Open Access, a desirable outcome in and of itself.

---

Jan Velterop [JV] (Springer Open Choice), wrote, in "Open access, quo vadis?":

JV: "Now that alternatives for the term 'self-archiving' are being suggested -- presumably in an attempt to increase the number of self-archivers --"

Actually, alternative terms are not needed, and will not be adopted, and the reason alternatives were even being mentioned was because of the distracting and irrelevant associations with preservation-archiving of originals, rather than access-archiving of supplementary copies (authors' final refereed drafts) of journal articles.

JV: "it may be time to face up to some uncomfortable truths. Let's be honest, open access is just not all that attractive to individual researchers when they publish their articles."

If that were indeed true, it would of course be just as uncomfortable a truth for Open Access journals as for Open Access self-archiving. But I think it is very far from being true! (Isn't OA what 34,000 researchers, for example, signed the PLoS Open Letter to demand in 2001?)

Jan is conflating two separate things here, both of which researchers indeed do find unattractive, but neither of which is Open Access (OA) itself: (1) paying OA journal publication charges and (2) doing the keystrokes to OA self-archive.

In reality, researchers find it no more nor less attractive to provide OA to their publications than they find it attractive to publish at all: For let us not forget that without "publish or perish" mandates, Springer's journals would be a lot thinner in content!

Fortunately, the publish-or-perish mandate can be naturally extended, in the online age, to "publish and self-archive" -- in order to maximize each article's usage and citation impact. Both publications and citations are already being counted and rewarded by researchers' employers and funders today, and the two JISC author surveys by Swan & Brown (plus several subsequent replications as well as concrete implementations) have confirmed that about 95% of authors will comply with self-archiving mandates (81% of them willingly, only 14% of them reluctantly).

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.

Nor (as the surveys likewise show) is it the case that OA is not attractive to researchers (and Jan too had better hope that's not the case!). It is the case that many researchers still don't know about OA, and that many of those who do know still think OA means they would have to publish in journals other than their currently preferred ones.

Researchers are mistaken, of course, on both counts. Researchers' first mistake is unawareness that with journals that offer Open Choice there is no need for them to switch journals: they are given the option to pay their chosen journal to provide OA for their article. Researchers' second mistake is that there is no need for them (or their institutions or their funders) to pay for Open Choice either, because authors can self-archive their own published articles.

It may be the combination of these truths that causes Jan's heartache:

JV: "I say that with pain in my heart, but we have, as proponents of open access, singularly failed to get enough support among researchers. Not for want of trying. The proposition is simply not strong enough."

Yes, telling researchers about OA and its benefits -- whether gold OA publishing or green OA self-archiving -- is not enough to induce more than about 5% - 25% of researchers to go ahead and provide OA, either way. That's why OA mandates from their institutions and funders are needed to induce researchers to do it, for their own (and the public) good, just as mandates were needed to induce them to publish at all, for their own (and the public) good.

But only OA self-archiving can be mandated: OA publishing cannot be mandated (1) until enough publishers offer at least the Open Choice option and (far more important) (2) until the cash that is currently tied up in paying for institutional journal subscriptions is freed so it can be "re-routed" to pay for institutional OA publishing costs.

So instead of feeling a pain in his heart, Jan should be vigorously supporting OA self-archiving mandates because (a) they are sure to provide immediate (at least 95%) OA and (b) if they ever do cause substantial subscription cancellations, they will free up the cash to be re-routed to pay for OA publishing.

JV: "That doesn't, of course, make open access any less desirable. But researchers, as we all, do live in an ego-system and the strength of a person's interest in anything seems to diminish with at least the square of the distance (metaphorical or otherwise) to his or her id."

How far are citation-counts from a researcher's ego or id?

But it is not ego that's keeping researchers from performing the few extra keystrokes it takes per article (over and above the keystrokes to write it) to self-archive it: it's ergo and igno: ergonomic inertia together with ignorance about how few keystrokes and how little time are actually involved in self-archiving:

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.

Researchers who have never self-archived imagine that it takes a lot of time and trouble. In reality it does not. The self-archiving mandates will see to it that researchers discover for themselves how little effort it entails, for such a substantial benefit (to themselves).

JV: "The benefits of open access 'to science' are apparently pretty distant to an average researcher."

But his own citation impact is not.

JV: "Now, I know that the case has been made that there are benefits at closer proximity to researchers' ids, such as increased citations to their articles, but they seem, grosso modo, wholly underwhelmed by those."

(1) More underinformed than underwhelmed (but time is remedying that).

(2) Information about personal benefits alone, however, is not enough to induce researchers to provide OA, any more than information about the personal benefits of publishing alone is enough to induce them to publish. The carrot/stick of "publish or perish" was needed for the one, and its natural online-age extension to OA self-archiving is now needed for the other.

(3) On the other hand, researchers' institutions and funders seem to be less "underwhelmed" about the benefits of OA self-archiving than the researchers themselves, for they (RCUK, FRPAA, NIH, CURES, EC, CERN, and several individual universities) are evidently inclined to mandate it

(4) Who is opposing the mandates? Not researchers: publishers.

(5) Where does Jan (with all the pain in his heart) stand on self-archiving mandates?

JV: "So what now? Mandates, it appears. From the funders -- organisations in charge of the scholarly super-ego, as it were. They have the power to impose OA on their grantees, and maybe the duty. And as they mostly pay the bill for library subscriptions anyway (indirectly, via overhead charges of institutions, but they pay nonetheless), they could simply re-route that money to OA article processing charges and reform publishing in the process. They may still, and follow the excellent leadership of the Wellcome Trust in this regard."

But dear Jan, the message does not seem to be sinking in: It is not OA publishing that funders are proposing to mandate, it is OA self-archiving. And there is no money (nor need) to "re-route" while it is all tied up in paying the bills for publication via subscriptions!

JV: "There seems to be one thing standing in the way. Conflation of financial concerns with open access is, unfortunately, a major barrier to open access."

Whose financial concerns? Whose conflation? Research funders and institutions are proposing to mandate OA self-archiving, and publishers are opposing it, claiming it puts their finances at risk. So what, exactly, is the "major barrier" to OA at this moment?

JV: "If open access were a real priority, in other words, if the starting point would not so much be cost evasion, but the principle that for the amounts now spent on scholarly literature one could, and should, have open access, and if a widespread willingness were displayed on the part of funders and librarians to help flip the model, then I'm thoroughly convinced we would be much, much further with open access."

"Cost evasion"? When, as you say, correctly, "the amounts now spent on scholarly literature" are tied up in subscriptions? Isn't it closer to reality to say that this is, if anything, "re-routing evasion," since the costs are all being paid?

Let me translate what you are saying, Jan: If all publishers converted to Open Choice, and if all institutions cancelled all their subscriptions, then there would be plenty of cash to pay for taking the paid-OA option. But this is evidently not happening, and it cannot be mandated. "Re-routing" cannot be mandated.

Self-archiving, however, can be mandated. And perhaps it will eventually lead to the same outcome ("re-routing"). But before that it will certainly lead to the OA that is already long overdue.

It is not a matter of springing still more cash, in advance, to pay for OA, at a time when journals are already making ends meet via subscriptions. The available cash is all tied up; moreover, there's no need for further cash: There's need for further OA. And that's what OA self-archiving mandates will deliver, now.

Moreover, re-routing is not the goal of OA or the OA movement: OA is!

JV: "And as for financial concerns, inherent in an author-side payment model is a much clearer scope for real competition, and that will put downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on efficiencies as any economist will tell us. Putting the horse before the cart might be a good idea, for a change."

Fine, but first we would have to get from here to there. And there -- i.e., OA publishing -- is not the pressing goal: OA is. And that is what OA self-archiving mandates will provide. The horse is OA, which can be mandated through self-archiving mandates. The cart (publishing reform) is hypothetical, but if the cart ever does get re-routed in that direction, surely it will be driven by the horse (the self-archiving mandate) not by a re-routing mandate!

JV: "There is of course the hypothesis, consistently put forward by Stevan Harnad (and Stevan is nothing if not consistent, you have to give him that), that we can have OA without reforming publishing and without damaging journals."

Jan, you are (knowingly or unknowingly) misrepresenting what I have been saying all along, despite the frequency (and consistency) with which I have been pointing out this published set of conditional probabilities, over and over, for years and years now:

What I have been consistently saying is that we can have immediate (and long-overdue) OA (e.g., by mandating self-archiving), right now, without having to first reform publishing. What subsequent effect that will in turn have on publishing is an empirical question, to which no one has a sure answer, so all we can do is speculate (see above link). I personally think 100% OA self-archiving will eventually lead to subscription cancellations and a transition (your "flip") to OA publishing.

So what is your point, Jan?

JV: "Consistent, but unfortunately, that doesn't make it right. In his world of self-archiving, all peer-reviewed and formally published articles would be freely available with open access -- although perhaps in an informal version, but still -- and librarians would continue to pay for subscriptions to keep journals afloat."

That is again an incorrect statement of my view. What I have said is:

(1) All evidence to date indicates that mandated self-archiving will generate 100% OA (1a) and will increase research usage and impact (1b).

(2) There is no evidence to date that it will decrease subscriptions, but it may or may not eventually do that.

(3) If mandated self-archiving ever does decrease subscriptions sufficiently to make it impossible to make ends meet via institutional subscriptions, it will then also have increased the institutional subscription cancellation savings that can be "re-routed" to pay for OA publishing.

But (2) and (3) are hypothetical speculations whereas (1) is a certainty. And (most important), a certainty whose demonstrated benefits are not outweighed by the hypothetical risk to publishers' subscription revenues.

JV: "As evidence he puts forward that having effectively had a physics archive in which published articles have been available freely for a decade and a half or so, this has not discernibly reduced the willingness of librarians to keep paying for subscriptions to the journals with the very same material. And indeed, he makes very plausible that in physics, over the last decade and a half, there has been no damage to journals. But then he extrapolates."

I do not extrapolate. I say (truly) that there is no evidence as yet of self-archiving's decreasing subscription revenues; but if and when it ever does, the system will adapt naturally, with institutional subscription cancellation savings being "re-routed" toward institutional OA publication costs.

JV: "And although Stevan may even turn out to be right -- only hindsight will tell and we have to keep an open mind on that -- for societies and other publishers just to take his word for it or even his 'evidence' that his extrapolations are valid, would be a serious dereliction of fiduciary duty, and sooo unnecessary. Because with some political will, publishing can be reformed, and reformed very quickly, without damage, or even the threat of damage, to anyone. And thus the problems could be fundamentally solved instead of treated with sticky-plasters such as OA through self-archiving (great as institutional repositories otherwise are)."

May I make a proposal? Go ahead and reform publishing! But in the meanwhile, please let OA self-archiving be mandated, so that researchers can have their long-awaited OA, ending at last their needless, cumulative research usage and impact losses, and so that any further adaptations, if there are indeed to be any, can take their natural course in the OA era.

Publishers should stop delaying and disparaging the OA self-archiving mandate and re-route their energy and attention toward publishing reform. Then everyone will be happy: Researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the public that funds them will be happy with their maximized research access, usage and impact, and publishers, with whatever they wish to do toward re-routing publishing toward another cost-recovery model.

Let one not stand in the way of the other.

PS There is perhaps also something to be said in defence of consistency (and clarity too): One cannot both affirm and deny the very same thing, no matter how one blurs it and how wishfully one thinks...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum