Open Access Archivangelism

Stuart Shieber's reply to Matt Welsh's worries about the Harvard Open Access policy is spot-on in every respect.

No one could be a more fervent well-wisher for the success of the Harvard OA policy than I am. But the crucial criterion for the success of an OA policy is how much OA it actually generates.

It is splendid that 95% of Harvard authors have not opted out of the copyright reservation clause. But what percentage have been complying with the no-opt-out deposit clause by actually depositing or providing a deposit-copy of their articles?

Stuart is certainly right that it is hard to imagine that providing the articles is "a huge pain." But is it clear to Harvard authors that they are required to do it?

Here are the relevant portions of the the FAS OA Policy:

I. Copyright Reservation Clause:

"Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles….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."

II. Deposit Clause:

"To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office."

Is it clear to Harvard authors that a formal opt-out from Clause I is not an opt-out from Clause II (i.e., that deposit must be done in any case)?

The answer to this question would be implicit in the annual percentage of Harvard's refereed research output that is actually being deposited in DASH. If that percentage does not approach or match the 95% non-opt-out rate for Clause I, then perhaps the contingencies need to be made a lot clearer.

Here's are four suggestions:

1. Place the Deposit Clause first, and state explicitly that there is no opt-out or waiver from this deposit requirement, only from the copyright-reservation clause that follows. All articles must be deposited in DASH. Access to those for which the Copyright Reservation Clause has been waived will be set as Closed Access instead of Open Access. (And, to prevent the deposit requirement from being a vague, open-ended one that can be left to be complied with in 2022, state explicitly that the deposit must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication.)

This clarification is all the more important, since universities are beginning follow Harvard's example by adopting the Harvard model as their OA policy: This makes it all the more crucial to make sure that the policy model is clear, understood, and actually works.

Here are the three further suggestions, that have both already been demonstrated to make an immediate-deposit (ID/OA) requirement more attractive and better complied with:

2. Designate deposit in DASH as henceforth the sole mechanism for submitting refereed research for performance review (the "Liège Model" OA mandate.)

3. Implement the automatized "email eprint request" Button in DASH, to allow individual users, via one click, to request a single copy of a Closed Access deposit for research purposes; the author can then likewise, via one click, fulfill or decline each individual request. This will help tide over research needs for embargoed deposits.

4. Provide download and citation statistics like IRstats to demonstrate for authors the benefits of depositing their articles.

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

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Armbruster, Chris, Implementing Open Access Policy: First Case Studies. Chinese Journal of Library and Information Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.1-22, 2010. ["a concise summary of many of the pioneering (e.g. QUT, Wellcome, Zurich, HHMI, FWF), comprehensive (e.g. PMC, ukPMC, INRIA/France) and international (e.g. SCOAP3) implementation efforts."]

Armbruster, Chris, Open Access Policy Implementation: First Results Compared. Learned Publishing, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2011. ["a comparative evaluation discussing the most salient issues, such policy mandates and matching infrastructure requirements, content capture and the issue of scholarly compliance, benefits to authors, and efforts to provide access and enable usage"]

Armbruster, Chris, Implementing Open Access: Policy Case Studies (October 14, 2010). [original report]

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Chris Armbruster's policy cases, comparisons and conclusions make several useful points, some new, others already noted and published by others.

There is also a lot missing from Armstrong's policy cases, comparisons and conclusions, partly because they do not take into account what has already been observed and published on the subject of OA policy and outcome, and partly because Armstrong fails to cover several of the key institutional repositories and their policies, including the first of them all, and among the most successful: the U Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science green OA self-archiving mandate was adopted in 2003, provided the model for mandatory OA policies in the BOAI Handbook, and continues to provide both OA repository guidance and (free) OA repository software and services; it is also the source of most of the OA policy variants at the institutions that Armbruster does take into account.

There are also some rather important confusions in Armstrong's conclusions, notably about versions, embargoes, "digital infrastructure," and the nature of green vs. gold OA.

For those who seek a clear, practical picture of the woods, rather than a rather impressionistic sketch of some of the trees, what both institutions and funders need to do is:

1. Mandate deposit of the author's final refereed draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the author's institutional repository.
2. Designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting refereed publications for institutional performance evaluation and for national research assessment.
3. Implement the email-eprint-request button to tide over researcher needs during the embargo, for any publisher-embargoed deposits.

Once institutions and funders have done that, all the rest will take care of itself (including versions, embargoes, "digital infrastructures" and gold OA.

Beginning this autumn, guidance to institutions and funders worldwide on implementing OA policies will begin to be provided by EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), founded by the rector of the University of Liege, another institution whose highly successful OA policy Chris Armbruster neglected to mention in his comparisons.

Stevan Harnad

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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In the Hedda Blog, Chris Maloney (Contractor for PubMed Central) asked:

"Can/do journal publishers put stipulations on authors, as a condition of publication, that their self-archiving have an embargo period (i.e. not be available for a period such as six months)?"

Yes they can and do. See SHERPA Romeo.

But over 60% of them (including most of the top journal publishers) do not, and instead endorse immediate "green" OA self-archiving of authors' refereed final drafts, in the author's institutional repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication.

For the minority of journals that still do embargo OA, there is nevertheless a work-around: The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate still requires immediate deposit, but allows the author to set access to the deposit as Closed Access instead of OA during the embargo. Would-be users web-wide can still access the bibliographic metadata, and can then use the IR's automated "email eprint request" Button to request a copy.

(This is not OA but "Almost-OA" and can tide over researcher needs while hastening the natural, inevitable and well-deserved demise of the remaining publisher embargoes.)

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

ABSTRACT: We describe the "Fair Dealing Button," a feature designed for authors who have deposited their papers in an Open Access Institutional Repository but have deposited them as "Closed Access" (meaning only the metadata are visible and retrievable, not the full eprint) rather than Open Access. The Button allows individual users to request and authors to provide a single eprint via semi-automated email. The purpose of the Button is to tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo on Open Access and, more importantly, to make it possible for institutions to adopt the "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access" Mandate, without exceptions or opt-outs, instead of a mandate that allows delayed deposit or deposit waivers, depending on publisher permissions or embargoes (or no mandate at all). This is only "Almost-Open Access," but in facilitating exception-free immediate-deposit mandates it will accelerate the advent of universal Open Access.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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Peter Murray-Rust, in his valid and important advocacy for data-archiving and data-mining, has been arguing for the advantages of Libre Gold OA (LiGoOA: free online access + re-use rights + publication in a Gold OA journal) over Gratis Green OA (GrGrOA: free online access). I argue that since GrGrOA asks for less, faces fewer obstacles, and is immediately reachable today if mandated, we should not miss that opportunity by trying to over-reach instead directly for LiGoOA, since it is not within reach.

The practical advantages of grasping gratis Green OA before trying to reach Libre Gold OA
Peter Murray-Rust (PMR) misses the main advantages of Gratis Green OA (GrGrOA):

(1) Immediate GrGrOA has far smaller obstacles, being already endorsed by over 60% of journals (including almost all the top journals).

(2) Hence GrGrOA can already provide at least 60% GrGrOA plus 40% almost-OA (with the repository’s automated email-eprint-request button) today.

(3) Hence immediate 60% GrGrOA plus 40% almost-OA can already be mandated.

This contrasts with Libre Gold OA (LiGoOA):

(1') LiGoOA is not yet endorsed by any journal other than the small proportion of LiGoOA that already exist (say, about 10%, and that does not include most of the top journals).

(2') Hence LiGoOA can only provide 10% LiGoOA today.

(3') LiGoOA cannot be mandated (today, or ever).

All the LiGoOA advantages PMR seeks will come, but before we reach LiGoOA we have to reach GrGrOA, and we won’t reach it by over-reaching: GrGrOA will simply inherit LiGoOA’s bigger obstacles.

(And what comes with the territory with GrGrOA is searching, downloading locally, reading, saving locally, data-crunching, printing off; that’s all. But it’s incomparably more than what we have now, without GrGrOA.)

No axioms: Just evidence, logic and pragmatics

PMR: "There is a difference between the size of an obstacle and the number of obstacles. I agree that there is quantitatively more opportunity for self-archiving than LiGo."

And for mandating 100% of it. And that's what OA is about: Reaching 100% OA, at long last.

PMR: "I do not understand the phrase “almost-OA”."

Articles deposited as Closed Access but semi-automatically requestable via the repository's email eprint request Button.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture OnlinePMR: "This figure [ % Gold OA] is growing"But not fast enough. And unlike Green, cannot be accelerated with mandates.

Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers, Open and Shut, 19 June 2011

PMR: "You assert opinions [SH: 'LiGoOA cannot be mandated']

Please describe how (and who) you propose to mandate (i.e. require) LiGoOA, that is, require authors to publish in Libre Gold OA Journals.

PMR: "Another axiom [SH: 'before we reach LiGoOA we have to reach GrGrOA, and we won’t reach it by over-reaching: GrGrOA will simply inherit LiGoOA’s bigger obstacles']"

Please describe how you propose to persuade authors who are not even providing GrGrOA to their articles, published in their journals of choice, for free, to pay instead to publish them in LiGoOA journals. (And then describe how you propose to mandate it, if they demur.)

PMR: "You and I differ as to what is formally allowable [with GrGrOA]"

If it's not "searching, downloading locally, reading, saving locally, data-crunching, printing off" as I said, then what is formally allowable with GrGrOA, by your lights?

Priorities and pragmatics

PMR: "I don’t see why the amount of something alters the rate of growth"

It doesn't. It's just that the rate of growth of Gold OA is way too slow. The current growth rate will not even reach 60% Gold OA before 2026, whereas Green OA mandates have been reaching 60% Green OA within two years of adoption for years now:

Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers, Open and Shut, 19 June 2011

PMR: "Libre costs the reader nothing. Yes, we have a prisoner’s dilemma, or a transition process. I would argue that the final state of full Libre will cost less than the current toll-access. But we are in the land of opinions, not logic."

It is the author who pays for Gold OA, not the reader. And it is the author who provides Gold OA, not the reader. So it is not a Prisoner's Dilemma but an Escher Impossible Figure. Green OA mandates can cure the paralysis for Gratis Green OA, and this is a matter of evidence and logic, not opinion. What's your alternative, for curing paralysis for Libre Gold OA?

PMR: "I would urge funders to insist on Libre content"

Good luck! But reality is that most funders don't even insist on Gratis content yet. Might it not be better to start to try to succeed in urging them to insist on at least that, first?

PMR: "authors to insist on financial support from either funders or their institutions"

If authors want, and can provide Gratis Green OA for free (and don't even bother to do it until/unless mandated), what leverage do they have with their funders (when research funds are already scarce) or with their institutions (whose spare funds are locked into subscriptions) -- even if authors bother to insist at all on what they don't even bother to do themselves for free?

PMR: "libraries cancelling as many toll-journals as possible"

Libraries are already cancelling as many toll journals as possible, but they can't cancel the must-have ones until/unless their institutional users can get access to their contents some other way. That's the Escher Impossible Figure (not a Prisoner's Dilemma). And what will resolve it is mandating Green OA, which, once Green OA is universal, allows the libraries to cancel their subscriptions, releasing the institutional windfall savings to pay for a universal conversion to Gold (and Libre!) OA.

PMR: "development of new and imaginative and lower-cost ways of publishing"

Gold OA publishing -- once all access-provision and archiving (and their costs) have been offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories -- will already reduce the cost of publishing to just the cost of peer review. All it takes to see this is a little imagination (but for that, you have to be able to defer immediate gratification on Libre OA!).

PMR: "Stevan has asserted [SH: 'if we start with an objective of 100% OA… we need to start by backing green OA, which has a clear strategy…. Ultimately we want the same thing, but it’s how we get there, and how quickly… that really matters'] as an axiom for 10 years. I don’t agree. And as important, Gratis OA is no use to me, while continuing to legitimise the ownership of material inappropriately"

But perhaps you'll allow that Gratis OA may be of use to many other would-be users, in many fields -- and that the fields for which Libre OA is more urgent than Gratis OA, if any, may be far fewer…

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

The primary target of the worldwide Open Access (OA) initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of those yearly articles is an author give-away that is written, not for royalty income, but solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers.

The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published.

Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already fully within the reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped because of a number of widespread and tenacious misconceptions.

The solution is for the world's universities and research funders to (1) extend their existing "publish or perish" mandates so as to (2) require their employees and fundees to maximize the usage and impact of the research that they are employed and funded to conduct and publish by (3) self-archiving their final drafts in their OA Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to (4) make their findings freely accessible to all their potential users webwide. Universities need to make deposit in their institutional repository the official mechanism for submitting research for performance review and research assessment; universities can also monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates through deposit in their institutional repository. OA metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact; and multiple layers of links, tags, commentary and discussion can be built upon and integrated with the primary research.

Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of publishing in OA journals ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; about 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards.

What is needed first is for all universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA. Thereafter, if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions, and so their institutions cancel their journal subscriptions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (by dropping the print edition, online edition, access-provision, and archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the institutional funds to pay these much lower residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing OA to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield an 8/1 benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. This 8-fold benefit/cost ratio for providing Green OA is substantially higher than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al, including gold OA. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that a transition to green OA self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas a transition to gold OA publishing depends on the publishing community. 

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green. Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21 (3-4): 86-93.

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59. 

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A. (Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational Conference on E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society: 13-22 

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. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. 

Harnad, S. (2008) How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates. Open Access Archivangelism 369

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) 

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Change in IEEE Author Policy:
Impact on MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
Posted March 23rd, 2011 by Ellen Duranceau

In January 2011, the IEEE changed a key author policy, discontinuing the right authors had to post the final published version of their IEEE articles on the web. This alters what authors can do with their work and how the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy can be implemented for these papers.

The policy change is not retrospective: papers posted before January do not need to be taken down from the web. But from January on, authors may post only their accepted manuscripts, not the final published version of their articles.

As a consequence of this policy change, the MIT Libraries can no longer copy the final published articles from IEEE’s database and post them in MIT’s research repository, Dspace@MIT, as we have been doing since the faculty passed their Open Access Policy.

Instead, the Libraries are now requesting that authors submit their final accepted manuscripts of IEEE papers for deposit under the Policy. Papers can be uploaded through a simple web form and will appear in the Open Access Articles Collection.

• IEEE’s policy
• MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
• Ellen Duranceau, MIT Libraries Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, x38483.

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The IEEE policy change is a good thing, a blessing in disguise.

Self archiving, by MIT authors, of MIT authors' final, refereed accepted drafts, is what the MIT policy and procedure should have been all along.

That's the procedure that will work, and the policy that can and will scale to all other universities, funders and publishers worldwide.

Mandated self-archiving of authors' final drafts is also what will usher in universal Green OA and eventually also publisher downsizing and transition to Gold OA, with journals reducing their services and costs to just overseeing peer review -- offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of mandated institutional repositories.

That will effectively turn the authors' self-archived refereed, revised, accepted final drafts into the canonical version of record.

If MIT had kept relying on importing the publisher's PDF, the MIT policy and procedure would not have been smoothly scaleable to the rest of the world's universities, funders and publishers, Green OA would be needlessly delayed and hamstrung, the current status quo and its modus operandi would have been locked in, and any eventual cost-cutting, downsizing to peer review alone, and transition to Gold OA would have been made far less likely.

Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green. Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59. 

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A. (Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational Conference on E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society, 13-22

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. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. 

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
EnablingOpenScholarship

Anonymous query: "Sorry for my ignorance. But is it possible to speak about  the golden road to open access and whether any institutions have taken up that road at all?"

The golden road to Open Access (OA) is to publish in Gold OA journals (free for the user online).

The green road to OA is to publish in conventional (non-OA) journals and to make the articles OA (free for the user online) by self-archiving them in the author's institutional repository.

About 20% of journals (but not the top 20%) are Gold OA journals.

Institutions and funders can mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving, but they cannot mandate Gold OA publishing. 

(They can neither require 80% publishers to be Gold OA nor can they require their researchers to publish in 20% Gold OA journals and not in 80% non-OA journals. There is also little or no extra institutional money to pay for Gold OA publication fees while the institutions' potential funds are still being spent on their annual journal subscriptions.)

Mandating Green OA can provide 100% OA (Green OA) with certainty.

Once it is universally mandated, 100% Green OA will probably (but not with certainty) lead to institutional subscription cancelations, making subscriptions no longer sustainable as the way of covering the remaining costs of publication.  If/when that comes to pass, journals will convert to Gold OA, and the Gold OA publication fees will be paid out of the institutional windfall subscription cancelation savings.
 
See:

http://www.openscholarship.org/

http://roarmap.eprints.org/

Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green. Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59. 

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A. (Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational Conference on E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society, 13-22

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. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. 

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Expert Conference on Open Access and Open Data, German National Library of Medicine, Cologne, December 13-14 2010

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OA, OA self-archiving, OA publishing, and data archiving

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université du Québec à Montréal
CANADA
&
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM

OVERVIEW: Open Access (OA) means free online access to the 2.5 million articles published every year in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research journals. OA can be provided in two ways: To provide "Green OA," authors self-archive the final refereed drafts of their articles in their institutional OA repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication (by conventional, non-OA journals). To provide "Gold OA," authors publish their articles in OA journals that make all their articles free online immediately upon publication. (Sometimes a fee is charged to the author's institution for Gold OA.) Because of the benefits of OA (in terms of maximized visibility, accessibility, uptake, usage and impact) to research, researchers, their institutions and the taxpayers that fund them, institutions and funders worldwide are increasingly mandating (i.e. requiring) Green OA self-archiving. Gold OA publishing cannot be mandated by authors' institutions and funders, but universal Green OA self-archiving mandates may eventually lead to a global transition to Gold OA publishing; it depends on whether and how long subscriptions remain sustainable as the means of covering the costs of print and online publication; if subscriptions become unsustainable, authors' institutions will pay journal publishers for peer review out of a portion of their annual windfall subscription cancellation savings. Data-archiving cannot be mandated, because researchers must be allowed the exclusive right to mine the data they have collected if they wish; but as Green OA self-archiving grows, data-archiving too will grow, because of their natural complementarity and the power of global collaboration to accelerate and enhance research progress.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

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

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. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Green and 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. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2009)  Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) 

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos

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. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28: 55-59

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds) 

UNESCO Conference on Open Access - Global and Danish Challenges. Ministry of Education, Copenhagen, Denmark, 6 December 2010

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The Open Access Paradigm: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université du Québec à Montréal
CANADA
&
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM

OVERVIEW: With the adoption of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates worldwide so near, this is the opportune time to think of optimizing how they are formulated. Seemingly small parametric or verbal variants can make a vast difference to their success, speed, and completeness of coverage:
What to mandate: The primary target content is the author's final, peer-reviewed draft ("postprint") of all journal articles accepted for publication.
Why to mandate self-archiving: The purpose of mandating OA self-archiving is to maximize research usage and impact by maximizing user access to research findings.
Where to self-archive: The optimal locus for self-archiving is the author's own OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR). (It is highly inadvisable to mandate direct deposit in a Central Repository (CR) -- whether discipline-based, funder-based, multidisciplinary or national. The right way to get OA content into CRs is to harvest it from the IRs (via the OAI protocol).)
When to self-archive: The author's final, peer-reviewed draft (postprint) should be deposited in the author's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. (The deposit must be immediate; any allowable delay or embargo should apply only to the access-setting, i.e., whether access to the deposited article is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access, in which only the author can access the deposited text; in either case, the article's metadata are immediately accessible webwide, allowing users to request eprint copies by email from the author immediately and semi-automatically during any embargo period).
How to self-archive: Depositing a postprint in an author's IR and keying in its metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.) takes less than 10 minutes per paper. Deposit analyses comparing mandated and unmandated self-archiving rates have shown that mandates (and only mandates) work, with self-archiving approaching 100% of annual institutional research output within a few years. Without a mandate, IR content just hovers for years at the spontaneous 15% self-archiving rate.

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.

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

Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Green and 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. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2009)  Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) 

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos

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. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28: 55-59

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds) 

Keynote Address: 19th Hellenic Conference of Academic Libraries," Scientific communities and libraries in a world of social networking and synergies," Panteion University, Athens, Greece, November 4 2010

The One Sure Way To OA

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université du Québec à Montréal
CANADA
&
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM

ABSTRACT: When research is accessible free for all on the web (Open Access, OA) it is used and cited substantially more than if it is accessible only to users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it is published.  This is called the OA Impact Advantage. Researchers, their institutions, their funders, the tax-paying public, and research itself all benefit from this enhanced research impact. Rich and diverse new metrics of research impact are being designed to measure and reward it, in research evaluation and funding.  There are two ways to provide OA: by publishing in an OA journal that makes it free for all online ("Gold OA") or by publishing in any journal at all and making it free for all by self-archiving the final, refereed draft in the author's institutional repository ("Green OA"). The percentage of research that is made OA is only about 20% until and unless the author's research institution or  funder mandates that research must be made OA, in which case the rate rapidly rises toward 100%. Only Green OA can be mandated. Hence the one sure way to OA is to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

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

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343

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. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Green and 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. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2009)  Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) 

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos

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. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28: 55-59

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds)