Open Access Archivangelism

There are multiple reasons for depositing the AAM (Author Accepted Manuscript) immediately upon acceptance:

1. The date of acceptance is known. The date of publication is not. It is often long after acceptance, and often does not even correspond to the calendar date of the journal.

2. It is when research is refereed and accepted that it should be accessible to all potential users.

3. The delay between the date of acceptance and the date of publication can be anywhere from six months to a year or more.

3. Publishers are already trying to embargo OA for a year from date of publication. The gratuitous delay from acceptance could double that.

4. The date of acceptance is the natural date-stamp for deposit and the natural point in the author’s work-flow for deposit.

5. The AAV at date of acceptance is the version with the least publisher restrictions on it: Many publishers endorse making the AAM OA immediately, but not the PV (Publisher’s Version).

6. Having deposited the AAM, the author can update it if and when they wish, to incorporate any copy-editing and corrections (including the PV).

7. If the author elects to embargo the deposit, the copy-request button is available to authorize the immediate automatic sending of individual copies on request. Authors can make the deposit OA when they choose. (They can also decline to send the AAM till the copy-edited version has been deposited — but most authors will not want to delay compliance with copy requests: refereed AAMs that have not yet been copy-edited can be clearly marked as such.)

8. The acceptance letter provides the means of verifying timely compliance with the deposit mandate. It is the key to making the immediate-deposit policy timely, verifiable and effective. And it is the simplest and most natural way to integrate deposit into the author’s year-long workflow.

9. The above timing and compliance considerations apply to all refereed research, including research published in Gold OA journals.

10. Of the 853 OA policies registered in ROARMAP 96 of the 515 OA policies that require (rather than just request or recommend) deposit have adopted the immediate-deposit upon acceptance requirement.

Below are references to some articles that have spelled out the rationale and advantages of the immediate-deposit requirement.

Stevan Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 67(11) 2815-2828

Swan, Alma; Gargouri, Yassine; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report.

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference)

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. The Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/

Postings about the immediate-deposit requirement in Open Access Archivangelism

Re: Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated (Richard Poynder)

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Let’s simplify:

1. Stick to peer-reviewed research articles: that’s all FOA is or was ever about.

2. Copyright and re-use rights are and always have been a red herring in the FOA age.

3. All that’s needed is an FOA version of the peer-reviewed research article.

4. That’s the author’s peer-reviewed final draft.

5. The only thing needed from “journals” (or equivalent) is the adjudication and certification of the peer review.

6. That’s a service, not a product: Nothing to “copyright.”

7. To make the current house of copywrit (sic) cards collapse, all authors need do is make 4 (the author’s peer-reviewed final draft FOA (freely accessible online)

8. FOA immediately (upon “acceptance”) and permanently (“FIPATRAFTO”).

9. For the faint-hearted and superstitious, there’s the Copy-Request Button during any (bogus) publisher “embargo” on “OA.”

10. Like Copyright worries (2), Button worries are red herrings.

11. FOA is all that’s needed or was ever needed.

12. Once researchers, their institutions and their funders get round to providing FOA (= “Green, Gratis OA”), Fair Gold “OA” (peer-review service fees) and all the re-use rights researchers need will be within trivial reach.

(Waiting for researchers, their institutions and their funders to get their heads around this and to set their fingers in motion continues to be yawningly boring; please wake me when they get round to it...)

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Charles Oppenheim:
Stevan is not quite correct. Copyright IS relevant because the authors foolishly agree to assign (or give an exclusive licence) it to the publisher. For Stevan's proposal to work, they must stop doing that. If a researcher has foolishly given away that right, Stevan's No 7 onwards in principle cannot work. So amend Stevan's 12 point plan by adding a final sentence to his point 6, "UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE AUTHOR ASSIGN COPYRIGHT TO THE PUBLISHER, OR GRANT IT AN EXCLUSIVE LICENCE TO THE WORK". Then his plan is legally watertight. I do agree with Stevan's final thoughts in brackets. I too am waiting.....

Stevan Harnad: Charles’s formal caveats are quite correct — for pedants and poltroons. But think: if the physicists in 1991 (or the computer scientists even earlier) had had the slightest inclination to give such reservations a single moment’s credence — instead of going ahead and doing exactly what they did (self-arxiving their preprints, and then their refereed final drafts, immediately, and not bothering with the publisher’s “version of record”), FOA would never have made even the modest strides it has made:

So let’s stop fussing about copyright and start self-archiving all our refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication! It’s 2017, almost 3 decades since good sense first erupted and prevailed in some intrepid subsets of the research community. Coraggio!

Apart from that (which should be done in any case), Charles is also right that it is foolish (and unnecessary) to assign copyright or grant an exclusive license to the publisher. The limited right to publish and sell the version of record, online and on paper, is more than right enough — and as much reward as they deserve for their one and only “value-added,” which is the administration of the peer review (which the peers provide for free, just as the author provides the text for free).

Scholastica Interview:

You’ve long championed the Green OA movement. Why do you feel this model has the most promise, and what do you envision for a Green future? 

Green-first is the only approach to OA (1994) that I have ever championed since long before the term “OA” was coined (2002):

My approach is, and always has been:

1. All researchers self-archive all their peer-reviewed research (immediately upon acceptance for publication, or even earlier, in their own institutional repositories). Self-archiving (1994) came to be called BOAI-I (2002) and then “Green OA” (2004) (with OA journal publishing, formerly BOAI-II, dubbed “Gold OA”).

2. Once Green OA is universal, libraries can cancel subscriptions (because everything is available as Green OA), making subscriptions unsustainable, and forcing peer-reviewed journal publishers to cut obsolete products and services and their costs and downsize to their only remaining essential service: the management of peer review. There is no more print edition and all archiving and access-provision is offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories.

3. Journals then have to down-size to just peer review and its cost and convert to Gold OA for cost-recovery (this is what I now call “Fair Gold OA”) paid for by authors’ institutions out of a small fraction of their annual windfall subscription cancellation savings.

4. But Gold OA before universal Green-OA-induced downsizing is “Fool’s Gold OA” because it is unnecessary, arbitrarily inflated in price, double-paid (uncancellable institutional subscriptions for their input and Fool’s-Gold OA fees for their output) or even double-dipped (in the case of hybrid subscriptions/fool’s-gold journals) at a time when subscriptions alone are already unaffordable.

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

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10209/ Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. 

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

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). 

Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

What has delayed this optimal, inevitable and obvious outcome is (1) researcher slowness in self-archiving, (2) institutional and funder slowness in implementing and monitoring Green OA self-archiving mandates and (3) Fool’s-Gold-Fever. Publishers have also tried to embargo Green OA — but for this there is a solution, the institutional repository’s eprint-request Button for any embargoed deposits:

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) 

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference) 

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141

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What do you think are the pros and cons of current Gold OA solutions such as using an APC or library subsidy model to fund publications? Do you think these models could become sustainable or do you think they are replacing current research funding struggles with new ones (e.g. instead of grappling with subscriptions libraries will now grapple with APCs)? 

For pre-Green Fool’s-Gold OA, it’s all cons and no pros. The pros are for Green OA, and that can be provided free. 

Pre-Green Fool’s-Gold is enormously over-priced (because it still includes the products and services and their costs that universal Green OA makes obsolete), double-paid, double-dipped (in hybrid Fool’s Gold journal), unaffordable and unsustainable.

In contrast, down-sized post-Green Fair-Gold (for peer review service only) is affordable and sustainable.

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Do you think control of research publication needs to be taken away from corporate publishers or do you think it is possible for them to work with the academic community? If the former, who do you think needs to take over research publication and dissemination - groups of academics running their own journals, societies or university presses taking back journals, library publishers etc. and why?  

No, I think this is all nonsense and has been holding us up for decades. There is no way to “take over” and it’s unnecessary. What’s necessary is for all institutions and funders to mandate Green OA. That will force downsizing and conversion to Fair-Gold without the need for "take-overs" (except in the case of abandoned titles, which can then indeed be taken over by Fair-Gold OA publishers).

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

Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the  Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)  67

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In the OA movement do you think there is a place for discussion about substantially lowering research access fees as opposed to trying to eliminate them entirely? Do you think this is something that is/should be considered more (e.g. iTunes model where articles are $2 instead of $40)? 

This is the oldest and silliest approach of all: the SPARC approach in the 1990’s (till they realized it doesn’t work and switched to Green and Gold OA): try to collectively negotiate licenses to lower the price of subscriptions. It doesn’t work, because journals are independent and will not downsize unless they are forced to. And only mandatory Green OA and cancellation can force them to do it. And no subscription price is a fair price because subscriptions are unnecessary and obsolete with universal Green OA

It is taking the author/institution/funder/library community a ridiculously long time to learn that that their only path to universal OA is by first universally mandating Green. The outcome remains optimal and inevitable (and obvious) but I have tired of repeating myself, so I am no longer actively archivangelizing except when asked.

Harnad, S. (1997). How to fast-forward learned serials to the inevitable and the optimal for scholars and scientists. Serials Librarian, 30(3-4), 73-81.

Harnad, Stevan (2016) Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview? CEON Otwarta Nauka (Open Science), Summer Issue 

http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml

https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/homenews?id=112

To measure compliance with an immediate-deposit (Green OA) mandate, the following would provide an estimate:

1. Require immediate deposit of the dated letter of acceptance.

2. Require immediate deposit of the accepted final draft. (You and I know that the publisher's PDF-of-record is superfluous for OA.)

3. Retrieve the institution's published output from WoS monthly (it is updated about monthly) or from SCOPUS via institution-name search.

4. Check (via software) each title for whether and when it is deposited (deposit date)

5. Compare deposit date with dated acceptance date.

6. Calculate percentage of monthly output that is deposited, as well as the latency (timing) of the deposit relative to the acceptance date.

7. Calculate proportion and length of OA embargo on deposits.

8. Calculate the volume of Request-Button traffic for embargoed deposits (requests, compliances, latencies)

.No, this is not too complicated nor too demanding (as everyone will of course cry). It's exactly the simple, natural compliance monitoring system that needs to be put into place in order to establish a natural long-term practice, one that ensures that immediate Green OA is always provided.

Of course, the institutions and funders need to stand firm on the carrots/sticks: Non-compliance should have consequences. It doesn't take much, because the policy does not ask for much.

Once it's a reliable and universal habit, the checks and stats can become less frequent.

Vincent-Lamarre, P, Boivin, J, Gargouri, Y, Larivière, V. and Harnad, S. (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 67(11) 2815-2828

(1) The old librarians’ “double-payment” argument against subscription publishing (the institution pays once to fund the research, then a second time to “buy back” the publication) is false (and silly, actually) in the letter (though on the right track in spirit).

(2) No, the institution that pays for the research output is not paying a second time to buy it back. Institutional journal subscriptions are not for buying back their own research output. They already have their own research output. They are buying in the research output of other institutions, and of other countries, with their journal subscriptions. So no double-payment there, even if you reckon it at the funder- or the tax-payer-level instead of the level of the institution that pays for the subscription.

(3) The problem was never double-payment (for subscriptions): It was (a) (huge) overpayment for institutional access and (b) completely intolerable and counterproductive access-denial for researchers at institutions that couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for subscriptions to any given journal (and there are tens of thousands of research journals): The users that are the double losers there are (i) all researchers at all the institutions that produce all research output (who lose all those of their would-be users who are at non-subscribing institutions for any given journal) and (ii) all researchers at all the non-subscribing institutions for any given journal, who lose access to all non-subscribed research.

Now take a few minutes to think through the somewhat more complicated but much more accurate and informative version (3) of the double-payment fallacy in (1).

The solution is very clear, and has been clear for close to 30 years now (but not reached — nor even grasped by most):

(4) Peer-reviewed research should be freely accessible to all its users. It is give-away research. The authors get no money for it: they (and their institutions and funders and tax-payers) only seek readers, users, uptake and impact.

(5) The only non-obsolete service that peer-reviewed journals still perform in the online era is peer review itself (and they don’t even do most of that: researchers do all the refereeing for free, but a competent editor has to understand the submissions, pick the right referees, umpire their reports, and make sure that the necessary revisions are done by the author). Journals today earn from $1500 to $5000 or more per article they publish, combining all their subscription revenue, per article. Yet the true cost of peer review per article is a small fraction of that: My estimate is that it’s from $50 to $200 per round of refereeing. (Notice that it’s not per accepted paper: There’s no need to bundle the price of refereeing all rejected or many times re-refereed papers into the price of the winning losers who get accepted!)

(6) So the refereeing service needs to be paid for at its true, fair price, per paper, regardless of whether the outcome is accept, revise + re-referee, or reject: a service fee for each round of refereeing.

(7) Now comes open access publishing (“Gold OA”) — which is not — repeat not — what I have just described in (6)!

(8) Gold OA today is “Fool’s Gold OA.” It includes two kinds of double payment subtler than the simplistic notion in (1). It has to be calculated at the level of the double-payer, the institution: Institutions must, first, pay (A) for the subscription journals that they need and can afford: the ones whose contents are otherwise not accessible to their users but need to be. Then, second, they must pay (B) the FGold OA publication costs for each paper that their researchers publish in a non-subscription journal. That’s already a double-payment: Subscription costs plus FGold OA costs. The S costs are for incoming S-research from all other institutions and the FG costs are for their own outgoing FG research output. And the FG costs are not $50-$200 per paper for peer review, but $1000 or much more for FG “publication fees” (now ask yourself what are the expenses for which those fees are payment!).

(9) And there is another “double” here in some cases, because sometimes the S-journal and the FG-journal are the same journal: The "hybrid" subscription/ FG publishers: These publishers offer FG as an option that the author can choose to pay for. That is double-dipping. And even if the hybrid journal promises to lower the subscription price per article in proportion to how many articles pay for FG, that just means that the foolish institution that is paying for the FG is subsidizing, with its huge payment per article, the subscription costs of all the other subscribing institutions.

(10) So FG is not only outrageously over-priced, but it means double-payment for institutions, the possibility of double-dipping by publishers, and, at best, paying institutions subsidizing the S institutions with their FG double payments.

(11) So FG does not work: Publishers cannot and will not cut costs and downsize to just providing peer review at a fair price (“Fair Gold”) while there are still fat subscription revenues as well as fat FG payments to be had.

(12) Yet there is another way that OA can be provided, instead of via Fools Gold OA and that is via Green OA self-archiving, by their own authors, of all refereed, accepted, published papers, in their own institution's Green OA Institutional Repositories.

(13) Not only does Green OA provide OA itself, but once it reaches close to 100%, it allows all institutions to cancel their subscription journals, making subscriptions no longer sustainable, thereby forcing publishers to cut costs by unbundling peer review and its true costs from all the obsolete costs of printing paper, producing PDF, distributing the journal, archiving the journal, etc. That’s all done by the global network of Green OA Institutional repositories, leaving only the peer review as the last remaining essential service of peer-reviewed journal publishers. That's affordable, sustainable, Green-OA-based "Fair Gold" OA.

(14) 100% Green OA could have been had over 20 years ago, if researchers had just provided it. Some did, but far too few. Most were too lazy, too dim-witted or too timid to do it. Then their institutions and funders tried to mandate OA -- so publishers decided to embargo Green OA for at least a year from publication, offering Fool's Gold OA instead.

(15) And that’s about where we are now: Weak Green OA mandates providing some Green OA but not enough. Some FG OA, doubly compromised now by the fact that authors have been taking it up as a kind of pay-to-publish opportunity, with weak peer review (or none at all, in the case of the many scam FG journals who are rushing to cash in on the Fool’s Gold Rush). Meanwhile OA activists are foolishly clamouring ore-emptively for “open data,” “CC-BY licenses” and “open science” when they don’t even have OA yet, subscriptions are doing fine, and FG is outrageously over-priced and double-paid, hence unaffordable.

(16) There are simple solutions for all this, but they require sensible, concerted action on the part of the research community: Green OA mandates need strengthening, monitoring and carrot/stick enforcement; there is a simple way around publishers’ Green OA embargos (the “Copy Request” Button , and a few institutions and funders are sensibly using the eligibility rules for research evaluation as the carrot/stick to ensure compliance with the mandate.

But I’ve tired of repeating myself and tired of waiting. It can all be said in these 16 points, and has been said, countless times. But it’s one thing to lead a bunch of researchers to the waters of Green OA self-archiving; it’s quite another to get them to stoop to drink.

So let their librarians keep whinging incoherently about “double-payment” for yet another decade of lost research access and impact…

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

______ . (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/

______ (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28 http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/

______ (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361704/

______ (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. The Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/381526/

______ (2016) Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview? CEON Otwarta Nauka (Open Science), Summer Issue http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/398024/

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/

Swan, A; Gargouri, Y; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, S (2015) Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/

Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 67(11) 2815-2828 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/

“I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us…. I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library.. and its [peer review] expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the [subscription cancelation] savings. The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!” (Harnad, 20th century)

Richard Poynder notes that 17 years on, Institutional Repositories (IRs) are still half-empty of their target content: peer-reviewed research journal articles.

He is right. Most researchers are still not doing the requisite keystrokes to deposit their peer-reviewed papers (and their frantic librarians' efforts are no substitute).

The reason is that researchers' institutions and funders still have not got their heads around the right deposit mandates.

They will, but they will not get historic credit for having done it as soon as they could have.

Richard also says authors are more willing to deposit in Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

Not so (see the "denominator fallacy"). In percentage terms those central Quasitories are doing just as badly as IRs. But their visible recruiting efforts (software that keeps reminding and cajoling authors) is clever, and something along the same lines should be adopted as part of funder and especially institutional deposit mandates. (Keystrokes are keystrokes, whether done for one's own institutional repository or a third party Quasitory.)

The biggest Quasitory of all is the Virtual Quasitory called Google Scholar (GS). GS has mooted most of the fuss about interoperability because it full-text-inverts all content. It's a nuclear weapon, but it is in no hurry. Unlike institutions and funders, GS is under no financial pressure. And unlike publishers, it does not have the ambition or the need to capture and preserve publishers' obsolete, parasitic functions (even though, unlike publishers, GS is in an incomparably better position to maximise functionality on the web). GS is waiting patiently for the research community to get its act together.

Institutions and funders are not just sluggish in adopting and optimizing their deposit mandates but they are making Faustian Little Deals with their parasites, prolonging their longstanding dysfunctional bondage.

Can't blame publishers for striving at all costs to keep making a buck, even if they no longer really have any essential product, service or expertise to offer (other than funding the management of peer review). Publishers' last resort for clinging to their empty empire is the OA embargo -- for which the antidote -- the eprint-request button (the IR's functional equivalent of Academia.edu and ResearchGate) -- is already known; it's just waiting to be used, along with effective deposit mandates.

As to why it's all taking so excruciatingly long: I'm no good at sussing that out, and besides, Alma Swan has forbidden me even to give voice to my suspicion, beyond perhaps the first of its nine letters: S.

Vincent-Lamarre, P, Boivin, J, Gargouri, Y, Larivière, V & Harnad, S (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 67 (in press)

Swan, A; Gargouri, Y; Hunt, M; & Harnad, S (2015) Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report.

Harnad, S (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource. eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference)

Harnad, S (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. The Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

[This comment was written before I read Richard Poynder's Interview of Tim Gowers. In part 2 I comment after having read the posting.]

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Part 1

I don't know about Richard, but I have not despaired of green, or green mandates; I've just grown tired of waiting.

I don't see pre-emptive gold (i.e., pre-green "fool's gold") as an alternative but as just another delay factor, the principal delay factor being human sluggishness. 

And I think the notion of a "flip" to fool's gold is incoherent -- an "evolutionary unstable strategy," bound to undo itself: not only because it requires self-sacrificial double-payment locally as well as unrealistic collaboration among nations, institutions, funders, fields and publishers globally, but because the day after it was miraculously (and hypothetically) attained globally it would immediately invite defection (from nations, institutions, funders, and fields) to save money (invasion by the "cheater strategy"). Subscriptions and gold OA "memberships" are simply incommensurable, let alone transformable from one into the other. (Memberships are absurd, and only sell -- a bit, locally -- while subscriptions still prevail, via local Big Deals. 

The only evolutionarily stable strategy is offloading onto green OA repositories all but one of the things that publishers traditionally do, leaving only the service of peer review to be paid for as fair-gold OA. 

But that requires universal green OA first, not flipped pre-emptive fool's gold. 

It will all eventually sort itself out that way after a huge series of false-starts. My loss of patience is not just with the needless loss of time but with the boringly repetitious nature of the recurrent false starts. I'd say my last five years, at the very least, have been spent just repeating myself in the face of the very same naive bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and non-viable non-starters. Locally in space and time, some people sometimes listened to my objections and my alternative strategy, but globally the very same non-starters kept popping up, one after the other, independently.

So (with an occasional exception like this) I've stopped preaching. Time will either show that I was wrong or, like evolution, it will undo the maladaptive strategies and stumble blindly, but inevitably toward the stable strategy (which also happens to be the optimal one): universal green first, then a rapid downsizing and transition to scalable, affordable, sustainable fair-gold. Amen.

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Part 2

1. Publisher green OA embargoes are ineffectual against the right green OA mandate: immediate deposit plus the almost-OA Button

2. That a “self-styled archivangelist” has left the arena is neither news nor an OA development. It is indeed just symbolic.

3. The fool's gold "flip" is an evolutionarily unstable strategy, fated to flop, despite the fond hopes RCUK, Wellcome, VSNU or MPG.

4. The "impact factor" is, as ever, utterly irrelevant to OA, one way or the other. Metrics will only be diversified and enriched by OA.

5. An immediate-deposit requirement is not an "onerous bureaucratic rule" but a few extra keystrokes per paper published: a no-brainer. Researchers are not "foot-soldiers" but finger-soldiers, and the immediate-deposit mandate is just intended to set those last few digits into motion (the publish-or-perish mandate having already mobilized the legions ahead of it).

6. Leaders are welcome (if not Wellcome), but boycotts are busts (and there have been plenty).

7. Exposés of publisher profiteering are welcome, but not solutions. In any case, the root problem is not affordability but accessibility, and providing access (via green OA) is also the solution, first to accessibility and then, as a natural matter of course, to affordability (post-green fair-gold).

8. Founding a new gold OA journal is hardly new. Offloading everything but peer review onto green repositories is also not new (in fact it will be part of the post-green end-game: fair-gold). But making it scalable and sustainable pre-emptiively would be new...

9. Subsidizing fair-gold costs would be fine, if someone had the resources to subsidize at least 30,000 journals across all disciplines. But while journals are being sustained by subscriptions, and there is no alternative way to access the contents, there is unlikely to be enough subsidy money to do the job. (Universally mandated green, in contrast, would allow journal subscriptions to be cancelled, releasing the money to pay for fair-gold out of just a fraction of the windfall savings.)

10. The impact factor, it cannot be repeated often enough, is absolutely irrelevant to (green) OA. The known track-record of journals, in contrast, will always be a factor.

11. Open "peer" review, or crowd-sourced quality control, likewise a notion aired many times, is, IMHO, likewise a non-starter. Suitable for peddling products and blog postings, but not for cancer cures and serious science or scholarship. (That said, anyone is everyone is already free to post their unrefereed work for all comers; that's what blogs and open commentary are for...)

12. Open online collaboration is very welcome (and more and more widespread) but it is a supplement, not a substitute, for publishing peer-reviewed findings.

13. Mathematics and, to a lesser extent, physics, are manifestly atypical fields in that their practitioners are (1) more willing than others to make their own unrefereed findings public and (2) eager to see and use the unrefereed findings of others. If this had been true of other fields, Arxiv would long ago have become the global unrefereed preprints and refereed postrprint repository for all fields, universal (central) green OA would already have been reached long ago, and the transition to fair gold would already have taken place. (Arxiv has been held up -- including, for a while, by me -- as the way to go since 1991. But things have not gone that way. That's why I switched to promoting distributed institutional repositories.)

14. What if the "P" in APCs -- for those who are "imPlacably opposed" to article processing charges -- stood instead for Peer-Review, and paid only for the editorial expertise in the refereeing (the peers review for free): selecting referees, selecting which referee recommendations need to be followed, selecting which revisions have done so and are hence accepted. These are the sole costs of fair gold -- but they are predicated on universal green to "overlay" on...

15. The two crucial features of peer review are expertise and answerability. This is what is provided by a qualified editor and established journal and absent in self-selected, crowd-sourced, take-it-or-leave-it vetting (already proposed many times, including by another distinguished mathematician). "Fair OA" is synonymous with fair gold, but universal green is the only viable way to get there.

16. Open peer commentary is a fine idea (if I do say so myself) but it is a supplement to peer review, not a substitute for it.

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...And let's get our figures straight

Rick Anderson posted the following comment on Richard Poynder's posting in google+: “Institutional Green OA mandates (as distinct from non-mandatory OA policies) are effectively nonexistent in the US, and it's difficult to see how they could ever become widespread at the institutional level. That's just the US, of course, but the US produces an awful lot of research publication.”

According to ROARMAP, which was recently upgraded to expand, classify and verify the entries, although it is probably not yet exhaustive (some mandates may not yet be registered) there are 764 OA policies worlwide, at least 629 of them Green (i.e., they either or request deposit)

The following are the total(subset) figures broken down by country for
total policies and the subset requiring - not requesting - deposit
for Institional and Funder policies.

Worldwide:
Inst 632 (390)
Fund 132 (82)

US
Inst 96 (69)
Fund 34 (11)

UK
Inst: 93 (79)
Fund 24 (23)

Germany
Inst 26 (2)
Fund 1 (0)

Netherlands
Inst 11 (6)
Fund 0

France
Inst 17 (3)
Fund 3 (3)

Canada
Inst 15 (7)
Fund 12 (9)

Australia
Inst 31 (15)
Fund 2 (2)

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Rick Anderson: Happy to provide examples.

Duke University -- ROARMAP says deposit is required and that the policy does not specify whether or not a waiver is available. According to Duke's policy, "The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the license for a particular article... upon written request by a Faculty member."

Harvard (Faculty of Arts & Sciences) -- ROARMAP says that deposit is required and may not be waived. The Harvard policy says that the institution "will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member."

Oberlin College -- ROARMAP says that deposit is required. Oberlin's policy says that while the submission of bibliographic metadata is required, "the Scholarly Communications Officer will automatically waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by the author."

Bucknell University -- ROARMAP says that deposit is required and that the possibility of a waiver is "unspecified." The policy says that "the license granted to Bucknell University for an article will be automaticaly waived for any reason and without sanction at the sole discretion of the faculty member." (Deposit of bibliographic data is requested but not required.)

That's probably enough for now. I can provide more upon request. In fact, if you'd like, I'd be happy to examine all 96 of the US institutional policies identified in ROARMAP, analyze the accuracy of the ROARMAP characterization of each one, and publish what I find (whatever the result might be). Would you like me to do that?

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Stevan Harnad: The Harvard FAS OA Policy model (which may or may not have been adopted by the other institutions you cite without their fully understanding its conditions) is that:

(1) Full-text deposit is required
but
(2) Rights-retention (and OA) may be waived on an individual article basis

The deposit requirement (1) cannot be waived, and is not waived if the author elects to waive (2).

This is the policy that Peter calls "dual deposit/release" (and I call immediate-deposit/optional-access, ID/OA):
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/7841.html
(soton site temporarily down today, apologies)

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Rick Anderson: Stevan, your characterisation of the Harvard policy seems to me to be simply inaccurate. The full text may be read at https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies/fas/. The relevant sentence reads as follows: "The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need." This language seems pretty clearly to me to refer to the policy as a whole, not just one component of it -- nor does the policy itself include an OA requirement; instead it provides the possibility that "the Provost's Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository" (note the word "may," not usually a prominent feature in mandatory instructions).

For the avoidance of doubt, I am contacting Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication to either confirm or correct my reading of its policy. I'll let you know what I find out.

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Peter Suber: Stevan's restatement of the Harvard policy is correct. Our waiver option only applies to the license, not to the deposit.

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Rick Anderson: OK, thanks for clearing that up, Peter. (You guys might want to consider revising the wording of your policy to resolve the ambiguity.)

Stevan, do you disagree that ROARMAP's characterisations of the other policies I cited above are inaccurate?

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Stevan Harnad: The other three policies you cited seem to have adopted the Harvard model policy. If they have diverged from it, they need to indicate that explicitly (and unambiguously). ROARMAP incorporates updates of corrections when it receives them. The ones you mention were either registered by the institutions themselves or derived from their documentation and sent to them for vetting.

I cannot vouch for 100% compliance or accuracy. But your assertion was not about that. Your assertion was “Institutional Green OA mandates (as distinct from non-mandatory OA policies) are effectively nonexistent in the US."

Do you think your four examples show that? One out of the four, Harvard FAS, would already disconfirm "nonexistent" ("effectively" being a weasel-word) even without the added fact that Harvard is not just any university, and the one whose model many US universities have adopted. And even if you could show (as you certainly have not done) that not one of the remaining 65 US institutional mandates (out of the total 96 US institutional OA policies in ROARMAP) was a mandate. Do you disagree?

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Rick Anderson: All of the examples I provided (including the Harvard example) constitute evidence in support of my statement, since they are instances in which Green OA is not mandatory. They don't constitute the entire evidence base. I made my statement based on the fact that I have read many OA policies from US institutions, and I have not yet encountered (nor heard of) a single one that requires faculty to make their work available on an OA basis. A policy that requires deposit but does not require OA is not a mandatory OA policy.

If my assertion is wrong, it should be easy to refute. Can you cite a significant number of examples of US institutions that do require faculty to make their work available on an OA basis (as distinct from merely requiring deposit)?

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Stevan Harnad: I would like to avoid empty semiological quibbling. The US has 96 institutional OA policies. That is uncontested. Of these, 69 are registered as deposit mandates, hence mandates.

There are many other conditions (such as whether and when it is mandatory to make the deposit OA), but it may be helpful to understand that the reason mandatory (full-text) deposit is the crucial requirement is that if (and only if) the full-text is deposited, the repository's automated copy-request Button (if and when implemented) can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to any user who clicks it (if the author too chooses to comply, with a click).

The hypothesis (and it is indeed a hypothesis, not a certainty) is that this compromise mandate (DD/R, ID/OA), if universally adopted, will not only provide almost 100% Green OA, but will prove sufficient to eventually make subscriptions cancellable, thereby inducing journal publisher downsizing, the phasing out of obsolete products and services, and a transition to affordable, scalable and sustainable Fair-Gold OA, charging for peer-review alone, and paid for out of a fraction of the institutional subscription cancellation savings, instead of the over-priced, double-paid, and unnecessary Fool's Gold that is on offer now, paid for out of already over-stretched subscription as well as research funds.

Comment on: Enserink, Martin (2016) E.U. urged to free all scientific papers by 2020. Science 14 April 2016.

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Fool’s Gold is pre-Green Gold (pay-to-publish Gold: I’m not, of course, referring to that tiny minority of journals that are Free Gold today because they are either (i) subsidized or (ii) their subscription publisher makes the online version free for all).

The reasons it is Fool’s Gold are four:

(1) its cost is vastly inflated with the cost of obsolete features with which it is co-bundled, such as the print edition and publisher PDF,

(2) as long as most journals are still subscription journals, the author’s institution is paying for both subscriptions and for Fool’s Gold,

(3) in the case of (the growing number of) hybrid subscription/Gold journals (accessible to subscribers only, but individual Fool’s Gold articles are free for all if they have been paid for by the author) the same publisher is being double-paid for Fool’s Gold articles (subscriptions from subscribing institutions plus Fool’s Gold from individual authors)

and, most important:

(4) OA can be provided at no extra cost to anyone via Green OA self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft (with immediate OA or immediate-deposit plus Button-mediated OA if the author chooses to comply with a publisher OA embargo)

Fair Gold is post-green Gold: That is the greatly reduced price of Gold after Green OA has been globally mandated (along the lines of what the HEFCE REF policy is doing):

(a) Immediate deposit in the institutional repository is mandated by all research institutions and funders
(b) Mandatory Green OA is provided universally
(c) Journal subscriptions can then be cancelled by institutions
(d) Journals are then forced to cut all obsolete costs by phasing out the print edition, the PDF edition (the publisher's "version of record"), archiving and access-provision and down-sizing to the only remaining essential in the Fair Gold OA era: just providing the service of peer review (the peers all review for free and always have_
(e) The green eprint becomes the version of record

The cost of this Fair Gold, which is just for peer review and, if accepted, certification with the journal name, will thus be affordable and sustainable (hence fair) because it can be paid out of just a fraction of the annual institutional windfall savings from having at last been able to cancel all journal subscriptions because of universal accessibility via Green OA.

The institutionally archived Green OA author final-drafts then become the official version of record. No more publisher’s version.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8)

Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference)

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. The Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141

Disagreement is always good — creative, even. I am not trying to change Richard Poynder's mind, just openly airing points and counterpoints, in the spirit of open peer commentary...

1. I agree that the home pages of Institutional Repositories that simply tout their generic overall deposit counts are doing numerology.

2. "Dark deposit" is rather ominous-sounding. The reality is that there are:

(i) undeposited articles,
(ii) metadata-only deposits,
(iii) full-text non-OA article immediate-deposits (which are non-OA for varying intervals),
(iv) full-text OA delayed-deposits and
(v) full-text OA immediate-deposits.

And there's the Button to supplement them. One can always describe cups as X% full or as (1-X)% empty.

3. No, to calculate yearly deposit ratios using WoS or SCOPUS in order to estimate total yearly deposit ratios is definitely not "deceptive": it is valid for WoS-indexed or SCOPUS-indexed output (which also happens to be the output that the OA movement is mostly about, and for), but it might be an underestimate or overestimate for non-WoS/SCOPUS output, if for some reason their ratio differs. So what?

4. Numerology is meaningless numbers, counted for their own sake, and interpreted according to taste (which can be occult, ornate or obtuse). Calculating correlations between mandate conditions and deposit ratios and drawing predictive conclusions from correlations whose probability of having occurred by chance is less that 5% is conventional predictive statistics (which only turns into numerology if you do a fishing expedition with a very large number of tests and fail to adjust your significance level for the likelihood that 5% of the significant correlations will have occurred by chance). We did only a small number of tests and had predicted a-priori which ones were likely to be significant, and in what direction.

5. Yes, there are far too few mandates, just as there are far too few deposits. Nevertheless, there were enough to detect the statistically significant trends; and if they are put into practice, there will be more effective mandates and more deposits. (The HEFCE/Liege immediate-deposit condition for eligibility for research evaluation turned out to be one of the statistically significant conditions.)

6. I heartily agree that academics are excessively micromanaged and that evaluative metrics can and do become empty numerology as well. But I completely disagree that requiring scholars and scientists to do a few extra keystrokes per published article (5 articles per year? 5 minutes per article?) counts as excessive micro-management, any more than "publish or perish" itself does. Both are in fact close to the very core of a scholar's mission and mandate (sic) qua scholar: To conduct research and report their findings -- now updated to making it OA in the online era. Justifiable animus against excessive and intrusive micromanagement is no excuse for shooting oneself in the foot by resisting something that is simple, takes no time, and is highly beneficial to the entire scholarly community.

7. Cultures don't change on a wish or a whim (or a "subversive proposal"!); they change when the pay-off contingencies (not necessarily financial!) change. That's how publish-or-perish worked (publication- and citation-bean-counting for employment, promotion, tenure, funding) and the online era now requires a tiny, natural extension of publish-or-perish to publish-and-deposit for eligibility for bean-counting.

8. And if we remind ourselves, just for a moment, as to why it is that scholars scull in the first place -- which is not for the sake of publication- and citation-bean-counting for employment, promotion, tenure, funding), is it not so that their findings can be accessed, used and built upon by all their would-be users?

Stevan Harnad

"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us... I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The [peer-reviewed journal| literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library... and its [peer review] expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the [subscription-cancelation] savings. The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!" -- Harnad (1999)

I must admit I've lost interest in following the Open Access Derby. All the evidence, all the means and all the stakes are by now on the table, and have been for some time. Nothing new to be learned there. It's just a matter of time till it gets sorted and acted upon; the only lingering uncertainty is about how long that will take, and that is no longer an interesting enough question to keep chewing on, now that all's been said, if not done.

Comments on: Richard Poynder (2015) Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories. Open And Shut. December 01, 2015

A few little corrections and suggestions on Richard's paper:

(1) The right measure of repository and policy success is the percentage of an institution's total yearly peer-reviewed research article output that is deposited as full text immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Whether the deposit is immediately made OA is much less important, as long as the copy-request Button is (properly!) implemented. Much less important too are late deposits, author Button-request compliance rates, or other kinds of deposited content. Once all refereed articles are being deposited immediately, all the rest will take care of itself, sooner or later.)

(2) CRIS/Cerif research-asset-management tools are complements to Institutional Repositories, not competitors.

(3) The Australian ERA policy was a (needless) flop for OA. The UK's HEFCE/Ref2020 policy, in contrast, looks like it can become a success. (None of this has anything to do with the pro's or con's of either research evaluation, citations, or metrics in general.)

(4) No, "IDOA/PEM" (Deposit mandates requiring immediate deposits for research evaluation or funding, with the Button) will not increase "dark deposit," they will increase deposit -- and mandate adoption, mandate compliance, OA, Button-Use, Almost-OA, access and citations. They will also hasten the day when universal IDOA/PEM will make subscriptions cancellable and unsustainable, inducing conversion to fair-Gold OA (instead of today's over-priced, double-paid and unnecessary Fool's-Gold OA. But don't ask me "how long?" I don't know, and I no longer care!)

(5) The few anecdotes about unrefereed working papers are completely irrelevant. OA is about peer-reviewed journal articles. Unrefereed papers come and go. And eprints and dspace repositories clearly tag papers as refereed/unrefereed and published/unpublished. (The rest is just about scholarly practice and sloppiness, both from authors and from users.)

(6) At some point in the discussion, Richard, you too fall into the usual canard about impact-factor and brand, which concerns only Gold OA, not OA.

RP: "Is the sleight of hand involved in using the Button to promote the IDOA/PEM mandate justified by the end goal — which is to see a proliferation of such mandates? Or to put it another way, how successful are IDOA/PEM mandates likely to prove?"

No sleight of hand -- just sluggishness of hand, on the part of (some) authors (both for Button compliance and mandate compliance) and on the part of (most) institutions and funders (for the design and adoption of successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button). And the evidence is all extremely thin, one way or the other. Of course successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button) are (by definition!) better than relying on email links at publisher sites. "Successful" means near 100% compliance rate for immediate full-text deposit. And universal adoption of successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button) means universal adoption of successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button). (Give me that and worries about author Button-compliance will become a joke.)

The rest just depends on the speed of the horses -- and I am not a betting man (when it comes to predicting how long it will take to reach the optimal and inevitable). (Not to mention that I am profoundly against horse-racing and the like -- for humanitarian reasons that are infinitely more important than OA ever was or will be.)