Open Access Archivangelism

Many thanks to Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust (WT) for responding to my recommendations on optimising the Trust's Open Access Mandate, but unfortunately Robert only repeats points with which I am already very familiar, while passing in silence over the actual substantive points I have raised, repeatedly, ever since the Wellcome Trust mandate was adopted 5 years ago (and even earlier than that).

Let me summarise the (many) positive aspects of the Wellcome Trust Mandate before specifying, once again, the negative aspects that can so easily be fixed.

POSITIVE ASPECTS OF THE WELLCOME TRUST (WT) OPEN ACCESS (OA) MANDATE:

(1) The WT OA mandate five years ago (2004) was the world's first funder mandate and helped to inspire many others.

(2) The WT OA Mandate not only came earlier than the NIH policy, but it was a mandate (requirement) from the very outset, whereas the NIH policy lost 2 years by being initially formulated as a request rather than a requirement.

(3) The WT in general (and Robert Kiley and Robert Terry in particular) have worked valiantly and tirelessly to promote OA and OA mandates during the ensuing 5 years.

NEGATIVE ASPECTS:

(1) The WT OA Mandate stipulates direct deposit in PubMedCentral (PMC) instead of institutional deposit and central harvesting; this counterproductive constraint has since been imitated by other funders following WT's example. Institutions are the universal providers of all OA output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines. If funders mandate institutional deposit, they encourage and reinforce universal adoption of institutional OA mandates (and gain a powerful ally in monitoring and ensuring compliance); if funders instead mandate central deposit, they discourage and compete with universalizing the adoption and implementation of institutional mandates.

(2) The WT OA Mandate permits a delay (embargo) of deposit for up to a year after publication. If funders instead mandate immediate institutional deposit, with no exceptions, the institutional repository's "author email eprint request" Button can provide 'Almost-OA' to would-be users while access to the deposit itself is embargoed; otherwise researcher access, usage and impact are needlessly lost during the embargo.

(3) The WT OA Mandate allows the option of publishers doing the PMC deposits in place of WT's fundees. This not only makes fundee compliance vaguer and compliance-monitoring more difficult, but it further locks in publisher embargoes (with no possibility of authors providing Almost-OA to tide over user needs during the embargo period) and further discourages convergent institutional mandates.

All three of these dysfunctional implementational details can be easily and fully remedied by simply specifying that deposit should be in the fundee's IR (or, if the fundee's institution does not yet have an IR, in an interim IR such as DEPOT) immediately upon acceptance for publication. That's all. The negatives are thereby immediately nullfied and the WT funder mandate becomes the optimal model for adoption by other funders, as well as a strong impetus to the adoption of complementary deposit mandates by institutions.

Now I reply to Robert's responses:

On 9-Dec-09, at 12:20 PM, Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) wrote:

RK: "Stevan

"Your last post made a number of comments about PMC, UKPMC and the Wellcome Trust, which I'd like to respond to:

"1. Empty repositories?

"[1a] You indicate that "PMC (or its emulators)" are bereft of content. This is not the case. PMC currently has around 1.9 million full-text articles. [1b] Looking at the compliance levels for funder mandate, we see that around 43% of Trust funded research is made available through UKPMC in line with our mandate. We are actively working to increase this figure. [1c] It is also worth noting that, because of our support for gold OA, a significant proportion of these articles are freely available at the time of publication."

[1a] Let me define an "empty repository": it's a repository that captures 0-15% of its total annual target content.

Why? Because 15% is the default baseline for spontaneous, unmandated deposit. You are not doing better than the default baseline if you are not capturing significantly more than 15% of your repository's total annual target content.

What percentage of the global annual output of peer-reviewed bio-medical journal articles -- per year -- do you think that PMC's grand total of 1.9 million articles represents?

It's only that (annual) figure (minus 15%) that tells you how non-empty a repository is, not the grand total -- and certainly not the grand total for a central repository whose denominator (the annual amount by which you must divide the annual deposits to calculate the percentage) consists of all the annual biomedical research output on the planet (or even all annual biomedical research originating from the US).

This is what I called the "denominator fallacy" in my prior posting.

[1b] In contrast, PMC is capturing 43% of WT's target content in 2009. That's certainly better than 15% (or NIH's meagre 5% before they upgraded their deposit request to a requirement). But that's mandated content.

And 5 years after the adoption of the WT mandate, 43% isn't really that good either. Indeed it was only last year that WT itself was about its low compliance rate:

In contrast, institutions that have adopted and implemented deposit mandates are doing a good deal better than that: Over 60% and well on the road to 100% about 2 years after adoption.

And the reason for the successful institutional mandates' success is quite evident: Institutions are the quotidial employers of their researchers, not just their occasional funders. Institutions have annual performance reviews for salary, promotion and tenure. They are in a position to mandate -- as the University of Liege has notably done -- that the procedure for submitting one's annual publications for performance review is henceforth to deposit them in the in the institution's IR; otherwise the publications will be invisible. This is a simple internal bureaucratic requirement, rather like the ubiquitous transition from submitting on paper to submitting online.

Institutions, as we all know, are also very eager that their researchers should receive research funding. Hence institutions are eager to be involved in helping researchers prepare grant applications as well as to ensure that they fulfill all grant requirements if funded. Fundees' institutions are hence funders' natural allies in ensuring and monitoring compliance with the funder's deposit mandate -- as long as the designated deposit locus is institutional. Moreover, funders mandating institutional deposit of the articles resulting from the research they fund, and institutions' involvement in ensuring compliance, also encourages institutions to go on and mandate deposit of the rest of their research output too.

But if it is instead stipulated by the funder -- and (I have to repeat this each time) stipulated for no good reason at all, since it confers no advantages whatsoever, either functional or practical, over institutional deposit, only disadvantages -- that the deposit must be central, then the fundee's institution is in no better position than the funder to ensure and monitor compliance. In addition, the institution then has the opposition of its researchers to contend with, if ever the institution contemplates adopting a deposit mandate of its own: Researchers (quite understandably, and justifiably) do not want to have to deposit willy-nilly in divergent multiple loci, institution-internal as well as institution-external. Add to that the further confusion added by the fact that fundee "compliance" can be fulfilled by publishers depositing in PMC instead of fundees, and after a one-year embargo, and you have both grant fulfillment conditions and mandate incentive conditions as ill-served and as hard to monitor as they could possible be.

And, again, for no good positive reason whatsoever.

[1c] Yes, the WT money that could have been spent on supporting more research, when it is instead redirected to paying for Gold OA publication, does increase the uptake of Gold OA somewhat. But is that the objective? Or is the objective rather to increase OA as much as possible -- which is what the Green OA deposit mandate itself would do, if compliance were indeed insured and monitored.

As to the best way to contend with the 1-year embargo at this point -- that's up to WT to decide. 63% of journals already endorse making institutional deposits OA immediately upon publication. If WT finds it a better use of its research money to pay for immediate Gold OA for the remaining 37% (rather than relying on the Institutional Repositories' "email eprint request" Button to allow the author to provide almost-immediate, "Almost OA" during the embargo), that's a judgment call. But it's not an argument for insisting on central deposit rather than institutional.

Note, though, that WT is on the side of the angels in having mandated OA already, rather than just offering to subsidize Gold OA. The trouble is that the "mandated Green OA deposit plus subsidized Gold OA option" policy is far less adoptable, for example, by poorer funders, or funders more anxious to use their scarce funds to fund more research rather than to subsidize Gold OA publishing. This is especially today, when OA can be had without cost, by mandating Green OA and just letting subscriptions continue to pay for publishing. And this remains true until/unless Green OA ever makes subscriptions no longer sustainable. Then (and only then) a transition to Gold OA will be payable out of institutions' windfall subscription cancellation savings -- and for a lot less than today's Gold OA's pre-emptive asking price, since the only thing left to pay for then will be peer review -- without the need to syphon away any additional research money.

Moreover, the example of pre-emptive payment for Gold OA has inspired another nonstarter, from funders and institutions that are not yet on the side of the angels: They are redirecting scarce research or institutional funds today, needlessly, to pay for Gold OA today without even first mandating OA, as WT has done. That's the worst of all possible worlds (and encouraged by the example of needless and ineffectual profligacy on the part of others, even when they do couple it with a Green OA mandate too...)

RK: "2. "National PMC's are a joke"

"The idea that UKPMC is a "joke" is not shared by the Wellcome Trust, or indeed the other 7 biomedical research funders in the UK who have established (and funded) this repository.

"You suggest that UKPMC simply holds UK content. This is not the case. It holds all the PMC content, but each "locality" (UK, Canada etc) can build services in top of that to ensure that it meets the needs of the research community we are trying to serve."

That's all splendid, and not the joke at all.

The joke is the notion that all these countries need a national PMC as the place to mandate deposit!

Of course all manner of harvesting services can be superadded to any number of harvested collections -- national, disciplinary or what have you. That's not the joke. The joke is that national funders are slavishly adopting the wrong-headed notion that they, like NIH/PMC, need their own national, central place to deposit their mandated contents -- instead of doing what NIH/PMC should have done in the first place (and should convert as soon as possible to doing now), which is to mandate institutional deposit, and harvest/import from there to any central collections or services they may wish to provide.

RK: "In January 2010 we will be launching a new UKPMC site which will offer users:

"A) A single access point to around 20 million bibliographic records - drawn from PubMed, Biological Patents, Agricola and Clinical Guidelines databases - as well as the 1.5m+ full text articles in UKPMC"

Splendid. But now please explain to me why the worthy and welcome goal of offering users a single access point for all these worthwhile contents needs to be reached by requiring UK-funded authors to deposit in UKPMC to fulfill their deposit mandates, rather than in their own IRs?

(And I do hope you won't reply that it's in order to accommodate the publishers, who need to deposit in UKPMC! Those articles are by UK fundees too! Let those fundees simply, and uniformly, deposit all their (mandated) articles in their own IRs, regardless of whether they are published in paid Gold OA journals, free Gold OA journals, subscription journals with OA embargoes, or subscription journals without OA embargoes: One size fits all, funders and institutions alike, across nations as well as disciplines, for both funded and unfunded research: Deposit institutionally.

RK: "B) Additional, local content. This includes guidelines from NICE and other NHS bodies, plus relevant (i.e. biomedical) theses derived from EthOS. So, by way of example, when you search the new site for say "management of stroke" you will be presented with relevant PubMed citations, full-text articles, UK clinical guidelines etc in one search."

All very valuable stuff -- but nothing in this is contingent on mandating central deposit. Harvesting of distributed content is the name of the game, in the online era. (We don't deposit directly in Google either. Google harvests distributed locally hosted content.)

RK: "C) New citation services. For every article (be it full text or just the bibliographic citation) you will be able to see all the papers which that paper cited, as well as all the other articles which cite that paper."

Lovely, stuff but nothing to do with the only point at issue here, which is whether or not mandating funders have any good reason to require divergent central deposit instead of convergent institutional deposit. (The latter might even help accelerate the institutional mandates you'll need to turn those bibliographic citations into full- texts -- at least for living authors...)

RK: "D) New text-mining services. Our colleagues at EBI and NaCTeM have build tools to textmine the content in UKPMC. In the first release (January 2010) users will be able to see in a "summary box" which will provide details of what genes/proteins, organisms etc are discussed in the paper they are viewing. Over the next 18 months this textmining functionality will be developed further in include chemical compounds, disease names etc etc."

Again very valuable, and again completely orthogonal to the question of locus of deposit -- which, to repeat, is the only one I keep banging on about.

(If funders wish to mandate deposit in specific formats, such as XML, they can do that equally well regardless of locus of deposit -- though I would not myself recommend over-constraining format requirements at this early stage, when it is the articles that are missing and sorely needed, rather than the documents already being accessible, and only the right format being sorely needed. And if, in contrast, the deposit tagging and format are being enriched by some other central service, rather than the author, that too can be done irrespective of locus of deposit, again through central importation or harvesting.)

RK: "The "franchise" model that PMC uses is akin to that developed for the human genome project inasmuch as content is mirrored to a number of sites (e.g. NCBI, Sanger, and DDBJ) but each centre develops their own interface to this content. So, the core content at PMC, UKPMC and PMC Canada is identical -- but each centre will develop their own valued-added services."

The "franchise" model is equally compatible with central deposit and with distributed institutional deposit and central harvesting...

RK: "The UKPMC Funders Group - led by the Wellcome Trust - are, with the support of European partners, exploring the possibility of creating a single, Europe-wide OA repository for peer reviewed biomedical research papers -- a Europe PMC. A workshop to discuss this is taking place on the 2nd December at the Berlin 7 meeting."

All these collections and re-collections of biomedical research papers and services are welcome, but have nothing to do with mandated deposit locus.

RK: "3. Why the Trust favours the author-pays model

"The Wellcome Trust has always argued that:

"A) dissemination costs are simply research costs
"B) publishers add-value to the research article"

Fine. Call the costs what one may: those publication costs and values are being paid for in full by subscriptions today. What is missing is access to those publications (for those whose institutions can't afford the subscription costs). Green OA provides that access, in full. And mandates provide Green OA, with no extra cost. It's up to WT if they want to spend more research money on reforming publishing, rather than just mandating that their fundees provide the access that is missing. But let paying for Gold OA not be mistaken or misrepresented as the fastest, cheapest or surest way to provide the missing access. It is simply using research money to try to reform publishing.

Nor can WT represent favouring the payment for Gold OA with scarce research funds over providing Green OA at no extra cost as something that favours OA: It does not. It simply diverts research money to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA, when it is not even needed; it disfavours the cost-free Green way of providing OA; and it sets an unfortunate example for other funders contemplating what they can do to increase OA.

RK: "It follows, therefore, that these costs have to be met -- and that is what the Wellcome Trust (and others) do."

It only follows that those costs have to be met if there is also a reason why research money has to be spent on reforming publishing today, when what is really needed today, urgently, is more research access, not less research money, nor publishing reform.

(Publishing reform will be needed, and will happen, if and when -- and only if and when -- universal Green OA makes subscription journal publishing unsustainable. But if and when universal Green OA ever does so, it will, by the very same token, also release the subscription cancellation funds to pay for Gold OA without the need to redirect scarce research funds. Indeed, universal Green-OA-driven subscription collapse will also force journal publishing to cut obsolete products and services (such as the paper edition, the online edition, access- provision and archiving) and their associated costs, downsizing to just the service of peer review. The distributed network of institutional repositories (and any harvester services thereover) will do the access-provision and archiving. So instead of receiving less research funding, researchers' institutions will enjoy a surplus from their annual windfall subscription cancellation savings.

RK: "It is also worth pointing out that when an APC fee is met, the Trust requires the publisher to provide a number of services:

"A) Deposit the final version - marked up to an XML standard - directly into PMC, where it must be made freely available at the time of publication. [So, no embargo, no "email request buttons", and no work on behalf of the author.]"

If you offered your fundees the choice (without fear or favour) of spending the WT research money on research or spending it to spare themselves the few keystrokes it takes to deposit their postprints (63%) and fulfill email eprint requests (37%), do you have any doubt as to what choice they would make? Especially if the designated locus of deposit were institutional, and hence they were already depositing their unfunded research that way...

RK: "B) Attach a licence to these articles, thus ensuring that anyone who want to re-use the work (e.g. text-mining, creating translations, re-using for different audiences etc) can do so. Whether such rights extend to author manuscripts is, at best, unclear."

More important, those rights and re-uses are completely superfluous. What's urgently needed (and prominently missing) today is online access to the articles, free for all. What comes with that territory is the capability of any user to search, link, read online, download, print-off, store and data-crunch a personal copy. In addition, harvesters like google can and will harvest and invert it. "Different audiences" can use the same URL. Translations (for the lucky few where it's wanted) can, as always, be handled on a case by case basis.

Let's talk again about any "text-mining" beyond this when there's enough OA text to make it worth talking about.

RK: "C) These articles can also be included in the OA subset, thus allowing institutions (and others) to harvest, via OAI, relevant full-text content."

That sentiment is not unworthy of Marie Antoinette! "Let the institutions harvest back their very own content, because we have elected to mandate that it must be deposited institution-externally." (Harvesting, for the record, is something central harvesters do over distributed providers of the content, not the reverse, i.e., not distributed providers of the content, harvesting back their own content from an institution-external central deposit locus where their own content providers have been required to deposit it, instead of depositing it institution-internally in the first -- and only -- place. (That's like saying: let everyone deposit their content in google, and then harvest it back if they want to host it locally.)

SUMMARY: Not one substantive reason has been given for WT's continuing insistence on central deposit rather than institutional deposit (plus central harvesting). Nor has a compelling reason been given for favouring paid Gold OA over free Green OA. (But if WT were, as I hope, to go on to mandate institutional deposit, paid Gold would become a minor matter, because as more institutions added their institutional mandates to WT's and other funders' mandates, the absurdity (and non-scaleability) of paying pre-emptively for Gold OA today, rather than just depositing for Green OA at this time -- whilst the potential funds to pay for Gold OA are still locked into subscriptions that are paying for subscription publication in full -- would become more and more obvious. The confusion and uncertainty about this today are simply a result of the extreme sparseness of OA content -- whether Green or Gold -- today [c. 15%], as well as the extreme rarity of OA mandates [c. 100/10,000].)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009, Stevan Harnad [SH2] wrote:

On June 27, 1994, Stevan Harnad [SH1] wrote:

SH2: "What on earth do you mean by "esoteric"? Are we supposed to have different criteria for a publication depending on how big a readership it is likely to have? In that case we need a sliding scale whose value we cannot possibly know in advance for every candidate piece of writing."

SH3: Just dull-wittedness. It should have been obvious already then that the primary target was refereed journal articles and that "esoteric" was a red herring.

SH2: "Paper publishing? Is this, then, merely about getting published articles online? That's not likely to be a very radical proposal, since (today, in 1994) it is surely a foregone conclusion that publishers will all have online editions within a few years. [So is this about] online, online-only, or free-online?"

SH3: More somnambulism: It should have been clearly stated as "free online access to refereed journal articles" (i.e., OA).

SH2: "Give-away writing might be a natural kind, but what distinguishes give-away writing from non-give-away writing? How does one recognize it in advance? And surely the distinction is not just based on probable market but on some other aspect of academic motivation. After all, textbooks are as "academic" as one can get, yet textbook authors are certainly motivated to sell their words, otherwise many would not do the work of writing them."

SH3: Addle-brainedness, yet again:

Refereed research articles are written purely for research usage and impact not for sales revenue. That's how you distinguish them. And you recognize them by the journal-names.

SH2: "Who are "peers"? And what is the reason for this obsession with reaching their "eyes and minds"? The fact that they are all in some sort of "esoteric" club surely is not the explanation."

SH3: Peers are the fellow-researchers worldwide for whose usage peer-reviewed research is conducted and published.

"Eyes and minds" should have been research uptake, usage and impact (e.g., as measured by downloads and citations).

SH2: "And this "building on one another's contributions" sounds cosy enough, but what is really going on here? It's certainly not about verbal Lego Blocks!"

SH3: Research uptake, usage, applications, citations.

SH2: "Fine. These authors are saints, or monks. But why? For what?"

SH3: Their research progress, their funding and their careers are based on the uptake and usage of their research findings, not on income from the sales of their writings. (User access-barriers are also author impact-barriers.)

SH2: "The criterion sounds like it's esotericity itself, but why? Besides, that's circular: Is give-away writing esoteric because its target readership is tiny? Or is its target readership tiny because the writing's esoteric?"

SH3: Fuzzy thinking again: Esotericity, though roughly correlated, is a red herring. Give-away writing is give-away writing, and wants to be freely accessible online because access-barriers are usage- and impact-barriers. (Yes, the potential users of most refereed research are few, but that's not the point, nor the criterion: the need to maximize usage and impact is the criterion.)

SH2: "And FTP archiving sounds fine, but isn't it already obsolete? This is June 27 1994, but Tim Berners-Lee created the Web 5 years ago!"

SH3: Ignorance, sir, pure ignorance.

SH2: "And there you go again with "electronic publication"? Is this just about moving to electronic publication? But that's surely going to happen anyway."

SH3: Fuzziness, pure fuzziness. It is and was about free online access, not about online publication.

SH2: "And is "esoteric" publication, then, merely "vanity press" publication? If so, then it's no wonder its likely readership is so tiny..."

SH3: It's about refereed publication, hence not vanity-press. (But there was definitely muddle and ambiguity regarding unrefereed vs. refereed drafts. The focus should have been directly on refereed drafts, with unrefereed drafts being only a potential entry point in some cases.)

SH2: "But physicists (who are doing it on the Web, by the way, not via FTP) have already been doing much the same thing (sharing their pre-refereeing drafts) on paper for years now, even before the web, or FTP, email, or the online medium itself. Is that all you mean by "esoteric"? And if so, the online medium's there now: those who want to share drafts are free to share them that way. That isn't even "publication," it's just public sharing of work-in-progress."

SH3: You're right, and that's yet another gap in my original logic. Nothing is or was stopping those who might wish to make their unrefereed drafts publicly accessible online from doing so; but that is not the point, nor the problem, nor the objective.

The problem is access to refereed, published research. All potential users need access to that; and all authors want their refereed research to be accessible to all its potential users (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happens to be published); whereas not all (or even most) authors want their unrefereed drafts to be accessible to all.

(And, yes, "esoteric" is once again a red herring. It ought to have been "peer-reviewed research" all along, to short-circuit potential ambiguities and misunderstandings.)

SH2: "Why didn't you say that in the first place? "peer-reviewed" rather than "esoteric.""

SH3: Mea culpa.

SH2: "But, again, nothing stands in the way of authors sharing unrefereed drafts online with their tiny intended public prior to submitting them for peer-review and then publication, does it? What's your point?"

SH3: The point is and should have been about peer-reviewed drafts. Earlier unrefereed drafts were just one potential entry point. (Perhaps I was just too timid or unimaginative to say "post your peer-reviewed drafts" at that time.)

But for me, another major motivation for posting writings was to elicit quote/commentary (as in this very commentary). And although the refereed, published draft can elicit commentary too, it is especially useful at the draft stage, when it can still help shape the final published version.

SH2: "But is [what's sought] really the "patina" of paper publishing, or the patina of peer-review, and a given publication's prior track record for peer-review quality standards?"

SH3: Just peer-review and track-record. The rest was again just ill-thought-through muddle.

(There may have been some faint excuse for such muddle way back in 1994; but one can hardly invoke that today, 15 years later, when all of these muddles have since been raised, rehearsed, and resolved, many times over, in countless online discussion forums, FAQs, conferences, and published articles, chapters and books. Hence the frayed patience of weary archivangelists even if they themselves are not free of original sin, insofar as not having thought all things through sufficiently rigorously at the very outset is concerned. There is no excuse for the same old muddles 15 years on...)

SH2: "And what, exactly, is the scope of "peer-reviewed publication"? Apart from journal articles (and refereed conference proceedings), aren't monographs, edited books and even textbooks "peer-reviewed"? And aren't some of them "non-esoteric," because revenue-seeking?"

SH3: There is genuine uncertainty about the cut-off point. All peer-reviewed journal articles are, without exception, author give-aways, hence all can and should be made freely accessible online to maximize their usage and impact.

The same may be true for some monographs, edited books (and possibly even some textbooks, if the authors are magnanimous). But none of these other categories is exception-free (rather the contrary). Freeing authors' writings online against their wills cannot be the objective of the Open Access (OA) movement. Nor can providing free access to writings to which the author does not want there to be free access serve as the basis for OA mandates by institutions and funders.

That is why the exception-free give-away content -- written solely for usage and impact -- is the primary target of the OA movement (and of OA mandates).

By the way, another enormous oversight in the Subversive Proposal (though I can hardly imagine how it could have been anticipated at that time) was the failure to call for (what we would now call) Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders. It only became apparent after another half-decade had passed with researchers' fingers still not stirred into motion by the Subversive Proposal that mandates would be necessary...

SH2: "The (obvious) flaw with the hope of making all refereed publications free online by first making their unrefereed drafts free online is that, unlike physicists (and, before them, computer scientists, and economists), most authors in most disciplines do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public (either because they consider it unscholarly, or because they fear professional embarrassment, or because they don't want to immortalize their errors, or because they thing unrefereed results could be dangerous, e.g. to public health).

Hence if the road to free online access is reserved for papers that their authors are willing to make publicly accessible as unrefereed drafts first, it will not cover much of refereed research in most disciplines."

SH3: All true, and, again, mea culpa.

The road to the optimal solution -- the one that covers all refereed research, immediately upon acceptance for publication, has been somewhat circuitous:

First, the Subversive Proposal recommended self-archiving all unrefereed preprints (but that would not work for the many researchers and disciplines that do not wish to make unrefereed drafts public).

A variant on that strategy was the "preprints plus corrigenda" strategy, which recommended self-archiving unrefereed preprints and later also self-archiving a file containing all corrections arising from the refereeing. Likewise inadequate, partly because, again, many authors don't want to make unrefereed drafts public, and also because it would be awkward and inconvenient for authors to have to archive -- and for users to have to consult -- separate preprint and corrigenda files.

It has to be added that the P&C strategy was never really intended as an actual overt practice: it was just intended to assuage the worries of those who thought there was some sort of insurmountable obstacle in principle to self-archiving the refereed version in cases where the publisher objected.

In reality, some publishers have objected even to self-archiving the unrefereed preprint [this is called the "Ingelfinger Rule"], but most have since dropped this objection. And the sensible strategy for the refereed postprint is to self-archive it and reconsider only if and when a publisher requests a take-down. Sixty-three percent of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint. And in the past two decades, there have been virtually no publisher take-down requests for the many million refereed postprints that have been self-archived. It's absurd to let a one in a million exception drive practice, especially when all it would entail would be a take-down!

But for those authors (and for those mandates) that insist on refraining from making the refereed postprint OA for the remaining 37% of articles until their publishers endorse it (most endorse it after an embargo period), the best author practice is to deposit the refereed final draft in their own institutional repositories (IRs) anyway, immediately upon acceptance for publication, but to set access to it as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access during any embargo. That way the repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to any would-be user during the embargo.

At the time of the Subversive Proposal, however, neither the OAI interoperability protocol, nor OAI-compliant institutional repository software, nor the notion of self-archiving mandates yet existed. So today's Best Practice solution was not yet in sight, namely: deposit, and mandate deposit, of all refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance; set access to the 63% of deposits that are published in Green journals to OA immediately; and, if you wish, set access to Closed Access for the remaining 37%, and rely on the Almost-OA Button during the embargo.

Once such IDOA -- Immediate Deposit, Optional Access -- mandates are adopted globally by institutions and funders, the days of embargoes are numbered anyway, under the overwhelming pressure of the benefits of OA.

And another thing that was not yet in sight in 1994 was the fact that the benefits of OA (likewise not yet named then!) could and would be demonstrated to authors and their institutions and funders quantitatively, in the form of the scientometric evidence of the "OA Advantage": significantly increased download and citation impact for OA articles, compared to non-OA ones. This too would eventually go on to encourage mandates as well as the increased the use of OA content to generate rich new metrics for measuring and rewarding research impact.

None of this was quite obvious yet in 1994.

SH2: "And what about all the published reprints that authors would prefer not to have shared with the world when they were just unrefereed drafts?"

SH3: Self-archive the refereed version immediately upon publication (and rely on the Button if you wish to observe the access-embargo).

SH2: "How and why did this "subversive proposal" (to the author community) turn into speculations about publishing and publishers?"

SH3: This is the plaint that plagues and shames me the most! For the needless and counterproductive speculation about the future of publication -- along with all the essential features of what would eventually be called "Gold OA publishing" -- were all introduced in that proposal, with the result that premature "gold fever" contributed to distracting from and delaying the ("Green OA") self-archiving that was the essence of the Subversive Proposal.

But I do think it was unavoidable -- in responding to the (now at least) 38 prima facie worries that immediately began to be raised time and time again about self-archiving -- particularly worries #8, #9, #14, #17, #19, #28, #30, & #31 -- by sketching the obvious way in which publication cost-recovery could evolve into the Gold OA model if and when universal Green OA self-archiving should ever make it necessary.

But I never imagined that the prospect of gold would become such an attraction -- mostly to those, like librarians, not in a position to provide Green OA themselves, but groaning under the burden of the serials crisis, but also to publishing reform theorists more interested in publishing economics and iniquities than in researchers' immediate access needs -- that gold fever would propagate and distract from providing and mandating Green OA, rather than reassuring and reinforcing it. (For some reason that neither Peter Suber nor I can quite fathom, people take to Gold much more readily than to Green, even to the extent of imagining that OA is synonymous with Gold OA publishing.)

Well, one reaps what one sows, and I accept a large part of the blame for having already begun to sprinkle gold dust way back in 1994, and continuing to stir it for some years to come -- -- until I at last learned from sorry experience to stop speculating about tomorrow's hypothetical transitions and focus only on the tried, tested and sure practical means of reaching 100% OA today: universal Green OA deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

I still think, however, that the proof-of-principle for Gold OA publishing by BMC and PLoS was, on balance, useful, even though premature, because it did serve to allay worries that universal Green OA self-archiving would destroy peer-reviewed publication altogether, by making subscriptions unsustainable, and hence making publication costs unrecoverable. No, it would merely induce a transition to Gold-OA publishing to recover the costs of publication. (Moreover, the costs of publishing then, after having achieved universal Green OA, would be far lower -- just the costs of peer review alone -- and paid for out of a fraction of the self-same annual institutional windfall savings on which the premise of subscription collapse underlying this set of worries is predicated.)

But there I go, succumbing to gold fever again...

SH2: "In this speculation about publishing media and costs, what have "pages" to do with it? And what, exactly, does the 25% figure pay for (and what is the 75% that is no longer needed)?"

SH3: Pages have nothing to do with it. That was just a regrettable momentary lapse into the papyrocentric thinking of the Gutenberg era.

The right reckoning is total publication costs per article. And once authors are all systematically depositing their refereed drafts in their institutional repositories, and users are using those OA drafts instead of the publisher's proprietary version, the global network of IRs becomes the access-provider and archive and the only remaining function (and expense) remaining for journals is the implementation of peer review, certified by their name and track-record. (The peers, of course, continue to referee for free, as they always did.)

SH2: "You seem to be pretty generous with other people's money. ["advance subsidies (from authors' page charges, learned society dues, university publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies)" And you seem to have forgotten the money already being paid for subscriptions."

SH3: More of the perils of premature speculation. Of course no extra funds are needed if the transition to Gold OA only comes after universal Green OA has been reached, and only if and when that universal Green OA in turn makes subscriptions unsustainable. For then, by the very same token, the subscription cancellation releases the funds to pay for Gold OA -- whereas paying pre-emptively for Gold OA now, while it is unnecessary, because most of the essential journals are still subscription-based, requires extra money (and at an inflated -- because again premature -- cost).

But you see how easy it is to keep getting taken up with Gold OA speculation instead of attending to Green OA practice, within reach since 1994, yet still not grasped?

SH2: "But what, exactly, is this money supposed to be paying for? (Again, there seems to be conflation of online-only publication, and its costs, with free online access-provision: surely they are not the same thing.)"

SH3: Today: nothing. After universal Green OA -- if and when that makes subscriptions collapse -- it will pay for peer-review alone.

SH2: "This still sounds quite muddled and vague: We've heard about "esoteric," give-away writings, but it has not yet been made clear what they are, and why they are give-ways."

SH3: Refereed journal articles, written only for research impact.

SH2: "We have heard about online publication, and online-only publication."

SH3: The Subversive Proposal was only meant to be about making refereed research freely accessible online.

SH2: "We have heard about (some) authors making their unrefereed drafts free online. But how (and why) do we get from that to free online refereed publication?"

SH3: Forget about the unrefereed drafts; they're just extras. The way to make refereed research free online is to deposit your refereed final draft, free for all, in your Institution's OA Repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

SH2: "And [how (and why) do we get] from there to paying to publish instead of paying to subscribe? (What needs to be paid for, how and why? And how do we get there from here, given that most authors do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public?)"

SH3: Right now, nothing needs extra to be paid for. Subscriptions are paying for it all, handsomely. All that's needed is author keystrokes, to deposit all final refereed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That's all that's been needed since 1994, but now we know the keystrokes need to be mandated, to set the fingers in motion, so what's needed is institutional and funder Green OA self-archiving mandates.

All of that is for sure, and will generate 100% OA with certainty.

The rest is speculation: If universal Green OA makes subscriptions no longer sustainable, publishers will cut costs, downsize to the essentials -- providing peer review alone -- paid for, on the Gold OA model, out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings.

SH2: Sounds like a rather inchoate proposal to me... (And you reputedly expect this to happen overnight? Might we have some more details about what we might expect to happen on that fabled night?)"

SH: Inchoate it was, in 1994, though the practical means to do it overnight (fingers) were already available in 1994. Since then, the OAI protocol and the IR software have made it a lot simpler and easier. But the keystrokes remain to be done. Thirty eight prima facie worries have kept fingers in a state of Zeno's Paralysis, despite all being answered, fully, many, many times over.

Now it is time to mandate the keystrokes. That too could be done overnight, by the stroke of a Department Head's, DVC's or VC's pen, as Wendy Hall (Southampton), Tom Cochrane (QUT), and Bernard Rentier (Liege) have since shown.

Will it be another 15 years before the remaining 10,000 universities and research institutions (or at least the top 1000) wield the mighty pen to unleash the even mightier keystrokes (as 68 Institutions and Departments, and 42 Funders have already done)? Or will we keep dithering about Gold OA, publishing reform, peer review reform, re-use rights, author addenda, preservation and the other 38 factors causing Zeno's Paralysis) for another decade and a half?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

A new (2009) dialogue on Green OA, with passerby's comments appended. (Cf. earlier [2001] dialogue's OA version, here).

Dialog on the Green road to Open Access
[Letter to the editor, D-Lib 15 (11/12) November 2009].
As imagined by Leo Waaijers, Open Access consultant, October 2009 -- Author A following the Green road to OA encounters "roadworker" L

A: Hello, L. This morning my publisher has let me know that my manuscript has been accepted for publication in his journal.
-- L: Congratulations, A.
A: Now he wants me to assign my copyrights to him first.
-- L: That's quite classical.
A: But my funder has mandated that I deposit my manuscript in an institutional repository from where it will be circulated openly over the internet after half a year. I am not sure if my publisher will approve this.
-- L: You may be able to find out about that on a web site called RoMeo. For about 10.000 journals RoMeo gives an overview of what publishers will allow you to do.
A: But what if it turns out that my publisher seems less permissive or my journal is not on the list?
-- L: Maybe your funder has included an opt-out clause for this situation. Most of the so-called mandates do have such a clause.

Mandates may be from funders (42) or from authors’ own institutions, faculties or departments (64).

No need to opt out. And no need to wait for open circulation in a half year either. Deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication. Make deposit Open Access (OA) immediately if the publisher endorses it (63%, which includes most of the top journals in most fields). Otherwise, if you wish, make it Closed Access (37%) and rely on the repository’s “email eprint request” button to provide Almost-OA during any OA embargo.

The “opt-out” clauses in self-archiving mandates pertain to whether you must successfully persuade the journal to accept the “author addendum” that formalizes your right to make your deposit OA immediate: It's worth trying to adopt this addendum, but not essential; hence you may opt out if you fail to persuade the publisher, or do not wish to. But you deposit immediately anyway.

A: The mandate of my funder seems quite rigorous.
-- L: In that case, don't assign your copyrights and write a letter to your publisher instead.
A: A letter?
-- L: It's not so difficult. The European Commission has drafted such letters in all European languages on their Open Access web site.
A: What if my publisher denies my request?
-- L: Then you have to look for another publisher.

Not true, and not necessary. See above.

A: Oh my God!
-- L: Well, I have never heard of a publisher refusing.
A: Thank goodness. And then?
-- L: Sign the copyright transfer and deposit your article.
A: That's it?
-- L: Yes, that's it. But don't forget to mention the half-year embargo period.

Nothing to mention about embargoes. If the copyright agreement imposes one, and the author wishes to honor it, deposit as Closed Access rather than OA (and rely on the Almost-OA Button during the embargo) but in any case deposit immediately, not after an embargo.

A: OK. Thanks.
-- L: My pleasure.
A walks on but returns after a few steps.
A: By the way, L. How can people find my publication during the embargo period?
-- L: Its metadata will be circulated over the internet.
A: What happens if someone wants to read it during this period?
-- L: She may request that you send her a copy.
A: So, that may generate extra readers for my publication?
-- L: Surely.
A: And extra citations?
-- L: Yes, could be.
A: And extra prestige?
-- L: Well, it depends.
A: What do you mean?
-- L: Prestige comes from citation indexes like Web of Science or Scopus. Make sure that all citations of your publication culminate there.

This is a nonsequitur: Citations are citations. If they are made by authors who publish in journals that are indexed by Web of Science or Scopus, then the citations will be indexed by Web of Science and Scopus. The author of the cited article has no way to “make sure” that authors who cite that article publish in journals that are indexed by Web of Science or Scopus. The author had no such power in the pre-OA era, and continues to have no such power in the OA era. (However, in the online and OA era Web of Science and Scopus and Scirus and Google Scholar and Citeseerx and Citebase are indexing more and more journals, hence more and more citations, because it is becoming so much easier and cheaper for them to do so.)

A: How?
-- L: Make sure that the official title, the journal issue and page numbers of the published version of your article are tagged to the manuscript that is in the repository. Then your repository could facilitate things so that these data are used for references in articles by others. You might check to see if they have a policy on that.

The full bibliographic citation (author, title, date, journal, etc.) is course be part the deposit’s metadata. From thereon, it’s up to users whether and where they cite the article, as it always was.

A: Hmm... And after the embargo period. What happens then?
-- L: Then both versions of your publication will be available. The official one only for those who work at institutes that can afford a subscription, and your manuscript for everybody.
A: Are these versions identical?
-- L: No, certainly not. But, as regards content, most differences are trivial and you can always incorporate any ultimate editorial correction in your manuscript afterwards.
A: Thus creating a third version – let's say the post-post-print?
-- L: Yes, if you wish so.

More important: The repository can also host and track postpublication revised drafts of the article, containing corrections, updates and elaborations, alongside the canonical original.

A: And the reuse conditions of the versions may be different?
-- L: Yes, they probably will be. Usually, the reuse conditions of your manuscript are not very well defined.

What “reuse conditions”? The peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication (along with any author updated drafts) is there to be linked, downloaded, read, stored, printed-off, data-crunched, quoted and cited by any user.

What further “reuses” are at issue? Google’s harvesting? That’s not the author’s headache... Course packs? Just link the URL.

-- L: the rest comes with the OA (and Almost-OA) territory.
A: Is it old fashioned if I feel a bit nervous about all this?
-- L: Some people might say so.
A: Well, I'll entertain the situation. Thank you very much. Good day, L.
-- L: Bon voyage, A.

Keep it simple, as it is in reality: Deposit all refereed drafts immediately upon acceptance. Set access as OA if the journal was Green (63%), and as Closed Access otherwise (37%), and rely on the Almost-OA Button. That’s all there is to it.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Professor Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard has done a JISC podcast interview about Harvard's historic success in achieving faculty consensus on the adoption of an Open Access (OA) mandate in a number of Harvard's faculties.

Professor Darnton's podcast is highly recommended. Just a few (minor) points of clarification:

1. Public Access. Although worldwide public access to universities' refereed research output is a desirable and welcome side-benefit of OA and OA mandates, a lot of research is, as Prof. Darnton points out, "esoteric," intended for and of direct interest only to specialists. It is the scholarly and scientific research progress that this maximized peer-to-peer access makes possible that confers the primary public benefit of OA. Pubic access and student/teacher access are secondary bonuses.

2. NIH Compliance Rate. Prof. Darnton referred to the very low (4%) rate of compliance with the NIH public access policy: That figure refers to the compliance rate during the first two years, when the NIH policy was merely a request and not a requirement. Once the NIH policy was upgraded to a mandate, similar to Harvard's, the compliance rate rose to 60% and is still climbing. (Achieving consensus on mandate adoption and achieving compliance with mandate requirements are not the same issue; nor is the question of which mandate to adopt.)

3. Covering Gold OA Publication Fees. As Prof. Darnton notes, the Harvard mandate (a "Green OA" mandate for Harvard authors to deposit -- in Harvard's OA Institutional Repository -- all their peer-reviewed final drafts of articles, published in any journal, whether a conventional subscription journal or a "Gold OA" journal) is about providing OA to Harvard's research output today, not about converting journals to Gold OA -- although Prof. Darnton anticipates that in perhaps a decade this may happen too. He and Professor Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard's successful consensus on adoption, both feel that it helps win author consensus and compliance -- to reassure those authors who may be worried about the future viability of their preferred journals -- to make some funds available to pay for Gold OA publication fees, should that be necessary. (This policy is just fine for a university, like Harvard, that has already mandated Green OA, but if Harvard's example is to be followed, universities should make sure first to mandate Green, rather than only offering to subsidize Gold pre-emptively.)

4. Journal Article Output vs. Book Output. The Harvard OA mandate covers journal article output, not book output. It would of course be a welcome outcome if eventually OA mandates made it possible for universities to save money on journal subscriptions, which could then be used to purchase books. But it must be clearly understood that not only does the OA mandate not touch books, but the economics of book publication are very different from the economics of journal publication, so even an eventual universal transition to Gold OA journal publication does not entail a transition to Gold OA book publication.

5. Compliance Rate With Opt-Out Mandates. It is important to understand also that the compliance rate for OA mandates with opt-out options, like Harvard's, compared to no-opt-out mandates is not yet known (or reported). (My own suggestion would still be that the best model for an OA mandate is the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access [ID/OA] mandate, which allows opt-out from OA, as the Harvard mandate does, but not from immediate deposit itself; ID/OA allows the institutional repository's "email eprint request" button to tide over user access needs during any publisher embargo period by providing "Almost OA" to Closed-Access deposits [what Prof. Darnton called "dark" deposits] during any publisher embargo.)

6. Proxy Deposit By Publishers. It is splendid that Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication is providing help and support for Harvard authors in understanding and complying with Harvard's mandate, including proxy depositing of papers on authors' behalf. I am not so sure it is a good idea, though, to encourage the option of having the publisher do the Harvard author's deposit by proxy on the author's behalf (after an embargo of the publisher's choosing) as a means of complying with the mandate. Best to keep that in the hands of the author and his own institutional assigns...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Professor Shavell's paper on copyright abolition conflates (i) books with journal articles, (ii) Gold OA with Green OA, and (iii) the problem of Open Access with the problem of copyright reform. Although copyright reservation by authors and copyright reform are always welcome, they are unnecessary for universal Green OA; and needlessly suggesting that copyright reservation/reform is or ought to be made a prerequisite for OA simply slows down progress toward reaching the universal Green OA that is already fully within the global research community's grasp.

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Critique of:

Shavell, Steven (2009) Should Copyright Of Academic Works Be Abolished?

[S. Shavell's Summary] "The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) -- suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the "open access" movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties."

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[Note: Professor Shavell's posting as well as the critique below are unrefereed, unpublished drafts ("preprints"). They have both been posted publicly, but they do not constitute formal "publications" in the academic sense, let alone peer-reviewed publications. In particular, Professor Shavell's working draft was posted in order to solicit comments, on the basis of which it is likely to be revised before being submitted for publication. These unpublished postings can, however, be referred to and cited, as long as the user is careful to make it clear that they are prepublication working drafts rather than lapidary refereed postprints that have been accepted for publication by a journal. This is all part of evolving scholarly practice in the online era.]

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Professor Shavell's paper contains useful analysis and advice about scholarly/scientific book publication, economics and copyright in the digital era, but on the subject of refereed journal articles and open access it contains too many profound misunderstandings to be useful.

(1) What are "academic works"? Shavell largely conflates the problem of book access/economics/copyright and journal-article access/economics/copyright, as well as their respective solutions.

The book and article problems are far from the same, and hence neither are their solutions. (And even among books, the boundary between trade books and "academic" books is fuzzy; nor is an esoteric scholarly monograph the same sort of thing as a textbook, a handbook, or a popularization for the general public by a scholar, although they are all "academic.")

Books are single items, bought one-time by individuals and institutions -- journal articles are parts of serials, bought as annual subscriptions, mostly by institutions.

Books are still largely preferred by users in analog form, not digital-only -- journal articles are increasingly sought and used in digital form, for onscreen use or local storage and print-off. (OA only concerns online access.)

Print-on paper books still cost a lot of money to produce -- digital journal article-texts are generated by their authors. In the online age, journals need only provide peer review and certification (by the journal's title and track-record): no print edition, production or distribution are necessary.

It is not clear that for most or even many authors of "academic works" (whatever that means) the sole "benefit" sought is scholarly uptake and impact ("scholarly esteem"), rather than also the hope of some royalty revenue -- whereas it is certain that all journal article authors, without a single exception, do indeed seek solely scholarly uptake and impact and nothing else.

(2) What is Open Access? Shavell largely conflates fee-based Gold OA (journal publishing) and Green OA (journal-article self-archiving), focusing only on the former, and stressing the deterrent effect of having to pay publishing fees.

(3) Why Pay Pre-Emptive Gold OA Fees? Gold OA publishing fees are certainly a deterrent today. But no publishing fees need be paid for Green OA while institutional subscriptions are still paying the costs of journal publishing.

If and when universal Green OA -- generated by universal Green OA self-archiving mandates from institutions (and funders) worldwide -- should eventually cause institutions to cancel their journal subscriptions, rendering subscriptions no longer a sustainable way of recovering the costs of journal publishing, journals will cut costs, phase out inessential products and services that are currently co-bundled into subscriptions, and downsize to just providing and certifying peer review, its much lower costs paid for on the fee-based Gold OA cost-recovery model out of the institutional windfall subscription cancellation savings.

Shavell instead seems to think that OA would somehow need to be paid for right now, by institutions and funders, out of (unspecified) Gold OA funds, even though subscriptions are still paying for publication today, and even though the pressing need is for OA itself, not for the money to pay for fee-based Gold OA publishing.

Universal OA can be provided by mandating Green OA today. There is no need whatsoever for any extra funds to pay for Gold OA.

(4) Why/How is OA a Copyright Issue at all? Shavell largely conflates the issue of copyright reform with the issue of Open Access, suggesting that the way to provide OA is to abolish copyright.

This is not only incorrect and unnecessary, but redirecting the concerted global efforts that are needed to universalize Green OA Mandates toward copyright reform or abolition will again just delay and deter progress towards universal Green OA.

Green OA can be (and is being) mandated without any need to abolish copyright (nor to find extra money to pay Gold OA fees).

Shavell seems to be unaware that over 90% of journals already endorse Green OA self-archiving in some form, 63% endorsing Green OA self-archiving of the refereed final draft immediately upon acceptance for publication. That means at least 63% Immediate Green OA is already potentially available, if mandated (in contrast to the 15% [not 5%] actual Green OA that is being provided spontaneously, i.e., unmandated, today).

And for the remaining 37% of journal articles, the Green OA mandates can require them to be likewise deposited immediately, as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access during any publisher access embargo, with the Institutional Repository's "email eprint request" Button tiding over research usage needs by providing "Almost OA" during any embargo.

This universally mandated 63% OA + 37% Almost-OA will not only provide almost all the research usage and impact that 100% OA will, but it will also hasten the well-deserved death of publisher access embargoes, under the mounting pressure for 100% OA, once the worldwide research community has at last had a taste of 63% OA + 37% Almost-OA (compared to the unmandated c. 15% OA -- not 4.6% as in Shavell's citation -- that we all have now).

In conclusion: Professor Shavell's paper on copyright abolition conflates (i) books with journal articles, (ii) Gold OA with Green OA, and (iii) the problem of Open Access with the problem of copyright reform. Although copyright reservation by authors and copyright reform are all always welcome, they are unnecessary for universal Green OA; and needlessly suggesting that copyright reservation/reform is or ought to be made a prerequisite for OA simply slows down progress toward reaching the universal Green OA that is already fully within the global research community's grasp.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SH: "[T]here is nothing either defensible or enforceable that a publisher can do or say to prevent a researcher from personally distributing individual copies of his own (published) research findings to individual researchers, for research purposes, in any form he wishes, analog or digital, at any time. That is what researchers have been doing for many decades, whether or not their right to do so was formally enshrined in a publisher's 'author-re-use' document."

RQJ: "This discussion strikes at the heart of green OA implementation. Among other things, it's why we have mandates."

Actually that's not correct. What I was referring to above -- authors mailing an individual analog reprint or emailing an individual digital eprint to an individual requester for research purposes -- predates both OA (Green and Gold) and (Green) OA mandates.

The only connection with Green OA mandates is that email eprint requests for Closed Access deposits whose metadata are openly accessible allow users to request -- and authors to provide -- individual one-on-one "Almost OA" during any OA embargo period: That way Green OA mandates can require deposit of the final refereed draft immediately upon acceptance, with no exceptions or opt-outs, no matter how foolish a copyright transfer agreement the author may have signed.

If a Green OA mandate does not require immediate deposit, then it is completely at the mercy of publisher OA embargoes: The author deposits only if and when the publisher stipulates that he may deposit, because all deposits are OA. If, instead, immediate deposits are required in every case, without exception, but where OA is publisher-embargoed the deposit may instead be made Closed Access during the embargo, rather than OA, then the email eprint request button allows the author to provide "Almost OA" on an individual case by case basis for the Closed Access articles during the embargo.

But if the mandate instead requires deposit only after the publisher embargo has elapsed, that means the only access during the embargo period is subscriber-access. That means a great loss of potential research usage and impact.

RQJ: "I believe Harnad is likely incorrect as a matter of law (at least in the US), but ultimately this may end up as a court case that gives us more explicit guidance.

If researchers sending individual reprints and eprints to individual requesters for research purposes has not gone to court for over a half century, it is difficult to imagine why someone would think it will go to court now: Publishers suddenly begin suing their authors for fulfilling reprint requests?

RQJ: "Note that "research findings" (which are the stuff of patent or academic integrity if protected at all) are very different from their expression in text, which is what is transferred through the copyright agreement."

We are not talking about research findings, we are talking about copies of verbatim (published) reports of research findings: sending them to individual requesters, as scholars and scientists have been doing for over half a century (since at least the launch of Eugene Garfield's "Current Contents" and "Request-a-print" cards):

Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93–101. "This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed each year, most being triggered by Current Contents..."

RQJ: "Note also that "what researchers have been doing for many decades" is disputable -- arguably what researchers did anteXerox was distribute the 100 or so offprints of their article that they got as part of their Faustian bargains."

They could also mail out copies of their revised, accepted final drafts.

And whether or not any of that was "disputable" before xerox, it certainly wasn't ever contested -- neither with the onset of the xerox era, nor with the onset of the email era.

RQJ: "Note also that courts would be under strong conflicting pressures if a case like this ever actually got heard. On the one hand, Harnad's point is good that courts would want to identify ways to find for those sympathetic scholarly authors. On another, anyone who has been following the RIAA (or remembers Eldred) knows that some of the courts also have tried to find in favor of the owners of the copyrighted works and in favor of sanctity of contract."

Notice that in all other cases but this very special one (refereed research journal articles) both author and publisher were allied on the same side of the copyright/access divide: both wanted to protect access to their (joint) product (and revenues) from piracy by third parties.

In stark contrast, in this one anomalous case -- author give-away research, written purely for maximal uptake, usage and impact, not at all for royalty revenue -- the publisher and the author are on opposite sides of the copyright/access divide, and publishers would not be suing pirates, but the authors of their own works (and not "works for hire!").

I would say that the differences from all prior cases are radical enough here to safely conclude that all prior bets are off, insofar as citing precedents and analogies are concerned.

And I would say that the de facto uncontested practices of millions of scholars and scientists annually for decades since well into both the photocopy and the email eras bear this out.

And although individual reprint/eprint request-fulfillment by authors is definitely not OA (though it is a harbinger of it), the growing clamor for OA today is surely making it all the harder for publishers now suddenly to do an abrupt about-face, endeavoring to contest individual reprint/eprint request-fulfillment by authors after all this time -- and now, of all times!

RQJ: "On a third hand, the institutional employers of the researchers might well try to assert WmfH or other compulsory license theories that trumped the publisher's copyright."

You are thinking here about what institutions (and funders) could do to force the issue insofar as OA is concerned (and I agree, they do have an exceedingly strong hand, and could and should use it if it proves necessary).

But that is not even what we are talking about here: We are just talking about the longstanding pre-OA practice of individual reprint/eprint request-fulfillment by authors, for research purposes...

RQJ: "On a fourth, there's the public interest in "the Progress of Science" and a dearth of good empirical data as to which copyright regimes actually do promote that progress."

All worthy and worthwhile, but probably not necessary, as neither individual reprint/eprint request-fulfillment by authors nor Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandates are copyright matters:

RQJ: "...Will it ever go to court? Maybe not. The publishers might win their particular case but lose the war by triggering a revolution."

What is the "it" that you are wondering about? Over 90% of journals are already Green on immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving in some form (63% for the refereed postprint, a further 32% for the unrefereed preprint).

So are you wondering whether the non-Green journals will try to sue their authors? No, they won't. At most, some may try to send them take-down notices, which their authors will either choose to honor or ignore.

But that isn't even what we are talking about here: We are talking about individual reprint/eprint request-fulfillment by authors, for research purposes: Wouldn't the time for authors to worry about that have been 50 years ago, before they began doing it, rather than now, when they and their children and grand-children have already been doing it with impunity for generations?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Matthew Cockerill (BioMed Central) wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

MC: Stevan, You suggest that the announcement [full text appended below] text: "The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) now requires authors to publish research results into open access journals and also encourages dual submission into an institutional repository," represents, in your words "self-serving spin by a commercial journal publisher".
    It is perhaps helpful to clarify that this specific wording was drafted not by BioMed Central but by Wilfrid Laurier University themselves, to describe their reasons for setting up an institutional repository. There may be room to improve the wording to better capture the nuances of the CIHR's two-pronged mandate - but it is hard to see how this announcement can be portrayed as devious commercial spin!

Matt, The Press Release did come from BMC, not WLU, but as you assure me that the wording was not BMC's, I hereby withdraw the imputation of spin (and just suggest that BMC might vet its Press Releases more closely...)

But it is hardly a "nuance" that what CIHR requires is to make articles OA, and that this requirement can be fulfilled either by (Option #1) publishing in an  OA journal (Gold OA) or by (option #2) self-archiving it in an OA Repository (Green OA). It is definitely both incorrect and misleading to state that CIHR requires publishing in a Gold OA journal and "encourages" Green OA self-archiving.

Logically speaking, "REQUIRE(X or Y)" definitely does not mean "REQUIRE(X) and ENCOURAGE(Y)"

And, as I said, the difference there is the difference between night and day.

If Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) has such a foggy understanding of the CIHR mandate it is a unlikely that WLU will be able to help its researchers to comply with it. (I hope BMC's Open Repository Service gives them a clearer idea!)

MC: More generally: As far as I can tell, Wilfrid Laurier, the CIHR, the NIH, Wellcome, RCUK, JISC,  BioMed Central and pretty much all other organizations seeking to encourage openness in scholarly communication see open digital repositories and open access journals as complementary partners, not the antagonistic opponents which they appear to be from your perspective.

The fundamental underlying issue of Green/Gold complementarity vs. competition requires a somewhat deeper, hence lengthier analysis, I am afraid, if there is to be productive partnership. So what follows is a "functional anatomy" of the complementary between Green and Gold, with careful attention to the dynamics of their causal interaction, interdependency and timing, in place of just a vague notion of independent parallel progress.

It is not Green and Gold OA per se that are in conflict but some of the ways some proponents have portrayed and promoted them. Green and Gold OA themselves are indeed complementary, if their respective roles in providing OA itself are described and implemented in a clear, sensible and transparent way, serving the interests of OA itself.

First of all, there is no mandate, anywhere, by funders or institutions, to publish in Gold OA journals.

Authors must be allowed to choose where they publish. There can only be a mandate to make all articles OA -- and, as CIHR and RCUK have indicated, either way of making articles OA is OK with them.

But insofar as IRs are concerned, it should be obvious that it would be both arbitrary and absurd for institutions to mandate that only articles published in non-OA journals need to be deposited in their IRs! Moreover, insofar as WLU is concerned, CIHR is not their only funder, and their research is not only biomedical (nor is it all funded).

So from an institution's point of view -- if they actually take the time to think it through, and if they are given sound guidance by their Repository Service Provider, free of conflict of interest -- all their articles should be deposited in their IR, regardless of what journal they are published in.

And that, once one thinks it through, can only be described as a blanket Green OA policy for all institutional research article output. (I say policy, because WLU does not yet have a mandate, as far as I know.)

Institutions, being the universal providers of all research output, in all disciplines, funded and unfunded, will want all of their research to be deposited in their IRs and they will also want it all to be OA.

So far -- without any conflict or complementarity -- this is all just basic Green OA: "Deposit all articles in your institution's IR."

Now we come to the complementarity. One way to make absolutely sure that the articles you deposit in your IR are OA immediately upon acceptance for publication is to publish them in either (1) a Green (c. 63%) or (2) a Gold (c. 20%) journal. (This is CIHR's "option #2" and "option #1," respectively, but re-ordered in terms of percentage scope.)

For the rest of your articles, the option is (3) immediate deposit and Closed Access during the embargo period (though the IR's email eprint request Button will provide "Almost OA" during the embargo for all Closed Access deposits, and the preprint-plus-corrigenda can also be made immediately OA for a further 32% of journals).

That is basically all there is to the Green/Gold complementarity -- apart from one other thing:

The very existence of Gold OA journals (as Peter Suber and Stuart Shieber have frequently pointed out in promoting OA) is a valuable "proof of principle" that there does exist a viable alternative model for publishing, should subscriptions ever become unsustainable (e.g., if universal Green OA mandates eventually lead to cancellations that make subscriptions unsustainable). This Gold OA proof-of-principle helps allay the common worry that OA and OA mandates might make publishing itself unsustainable.

This proof of principle, however, comes at a price, because Gold OA itself (despite the oft-repeated -- and true -- datum that the majority of today's Gold OA journals do not charge a fee for publication) comes at a price, especially for the high-end Gold OA journals (such as the BMC and PLoS journals).

(Perhaps the Gold OA journals that are still making ends meet via subscriptions, without charging a publication fee, are also a proof of some sort of principle, but I don't think that most worriers about the future of publishing after universal Green OA mandates would find that principle very reassuring as a universal principle -- and even less so in the case of the subsidized Gold OA journals.)

Hence it is the publication-fee-based Gold OA journals like BMC and PLoS that are providing this helpful proof of principle today -- but at the price of also introducing a deterrent, today: the publication fee, which many don't want to pay today and many more cannot even afford. 

I know both BMC and PLoS have exemptions for authors who are unable to pay, but that, like the self-sustaining subscription-based Gold OA journals, as well as the subsidized ones, is not reassuring enough to allay these counter-worries about whether Gold OA could successfully, affordably and sustainably scale to all journals if Green OA mandates make subscriptions unsustainable:

So the paid-Gold OA proof-of-principle to allay worries about how to recover publication costs if subscriptions become unsustainable is somewhat offset by counter-worries about affordability -- today. Most important -- and here we get to the point where some Green/Gold conflict does arise -- the straightforward and transparent way to describe this reality today is the following:

There is no need whatsoever to publish in a paid-Gold OA journal today -- if there is no suitable one, or one does not wish to, or one cannot afford to -- because OA can be provided for free, via Green OA (or Almost-OA) in all cases, without exception. (Then, if and when Green OA ever makes subscriptions unsustainable, subscription journals will convert to Gold OA, cutting obsolete costs by downsizing to just providing peer review, and the institutional windfall savings from the subscription cancellations will be more than enough to cover the costs of peer review via Gold OA fees.)

That is what Gold OA publishers -- even those that promote Repository Services -- cannot quite bring themselves to say, in describing the complementarity between Green and Gold OA, and I think this BMC Press Release is an example of that. The substantive relation between the Green and Gold aspects of all OA mandates is that each article must be deposited (i.e., Green) and the article may be Gold (when a suitable Gold journal exists, the author wishes to publish in it, and -- if the journal is paid-Gold OA -- the funds are available). 

And the transition from subscription-based publishing to Gold OA is not a matter of adding more and more new Gold OA journals now, when what is needed is more OA, not more journals, when the money is still tied up in subscriptions, and when the asking price is still far too high. It is the release of the subscription funds by the conversion of the existing journals to Gold OA under "competition" from universal Green OA that will make the conversion to Gold OA possible, not direct competition to subscription journals from new rival Gold OA journals today, when Green OA can be had for free, and mandated, without having to switch journals or pay extra for Gold OA

It is precisely this all-important essence of the causal and temporal dynamics of the complementarity between Green and Gold OA that was turned upside down in this BMC Press Release. And such reversals of both fact and logic are antagonistic not only to the growth and understanding of OA itself (and not just Green OA) but to the logic and pragmatics of OA mandates.

One last point: As WLU does not yet have its own institutional mandate, we are talking only about the CIHR mandate. The CIHR mandate -- which, like most funder mandates, has not yet looked carefully enough at the broader OA picture, and is focused exclusively on the fate of the articles it has itself funded -- has indeed improved on the NIH mandate by stipulating that the mandated deposit can be made in any OA Repository, not necessarily in a specific central repository like PubMed Central, as NIH currently stipulates.

This is an improvement on the current NIH mandate, but it is not enough. And that is why it would be helpful if CIHR were to be still more specific, and stipulate that the fundee's own IR is to be the default locus of deposit. The reason is to converge with and reinforce institutional OA mandates, rather than to compete with or complicate them. The overarching idea is to make all research OA, not just the research a particular funder funds; and for that, funder mandates need to facilitate mandates by the universal providers of all research: the institutions (the "still-slumbering giant" of OA).

It is because the CIHR mandate is still vague about this all-important constraint that CIHR leaves it ambiguous as to whether, in the case of fulfilling its OA mandate by publishing in a Gold OA journal, it is sufficient simply to do that, and not deposit it in an IR at all -- because it is already OA on the publisher's website. This is just as bad, because if makes institutional and funder OA mandates diverge and complicate mandate implementation and fulfillment, rather than converge and synergize, just as mandating central deposit instead of IR deposit does.

Failing to stipulate that there must be convergent IR deposit in both cases also encourages the notion that it's a matter of either Green OA self-archiving or Gold OA publishing, rather than self-archiving in the IR in both cases. Again, this is what the BMC Open Repository Service should be clarifying for WLU, if the common objective is full IRs and universal OA rather than just the promotion of Gold OA. This too is where a bland and blind invocation of "complementarity" will not do, and the devil is in the details.

[Alma Swan has just done a posting, and I've done a follow-up, about a related implementation problem with some of the current funder mandates such as Wellcome's: It is fundees who are being mandated, and whose compliance is being monitored, not publishers. Hence it enormously (and needlessly) complicates the monitoring of mandate-compliance if it is publishers (whether pure-Gold, hybrid-Gold "Open Choice," or subscription-based) who are expected to do the depositing (or merely the hosting) of the OA article, rather than the fundee. This becomes even more obvious in the case of institutional mandates: The complementary, convergent policy would be a uniform requirement -- expressed by both funder mandates and institutional mandates -- to deposit in the author's IR, with the author (or the author's institutional assigns) responsible for making the deposit, rather than a divergent policy in which compliance depends on third parties, in some repository or other.]

MC: BioMed Central is engaged in multiple collaborations with the academic community to develop efficient and manageable ways to automatically populate instutional repositories with authoritative final versions of articles immediately upon publication, and this seems to us (and to our institutional partners) to offer an extremely productive way forwards.

"Authoritative final versions"? This too sounds like a counterproductive criterion (possibly motivated by Gold-OA thinking): The reason the vast majority of OA mandates -- both funder mandates and institutional mandates -- specify that it is the author's refereed final draft that must be deposited, and not necessarily the publisher's authoritative version, is that most of the 63% of journals that are fully Green endorse making the author's final refereed draft immediately OA, but not the publisher's proprietary version. This makes OA mandates much easier to adopt and comply with than if they insisted on the publisher's version.

Nor is there any need for the publisher's proprietary version to be deposited, in order to provide 100% OA. The author's refereed, accepted final draft is enough; it is available immediately upon acceptance, and it is hence the natural default draft to stipulate in mandates as well as pre-mandate policies. The publisher's authoritative version is of course welcome too, just as publishing in a Gold OA journal is welcome -- but they are not only not necessary, but focusing instead on them is antagonistic to the rapid and smooth adoption and implementation of OA policies and mandates. If BMC's Open Repository Service is targeting the publisher's version instead, then it is giving institutions unsound advice, at odds with what will generate the most OA, the most quickly and efficiently.

MC: By developing 'Gold' open access journals alongside institutional repositories, a smooth path to a fully open access future for scholarly research communication is created.  

The smooth path that OA needs to take is it to 100% OA itself. The "future for scholarly communication" is another matter, a longer story. If the future of scholarly communication is (among other things) to be Gold OA (and I do think it is) then the smoothness of even that longer path will be paved and accelerated by Green OA mandates (the only kind of OA that can be mandated). In other words, the path to Gold OA is via Green OA.

MC: In contrast, your suggestion:

"Green OA will no longer be in competition with Gold OA once Green OA mandates have prevailed globally, and if and when the resulting universal Green OA eventually induces a universal transition to Gold OA by making subscriptions unsustainable."

implies that you hope (optimistically) that Gold OA journals would appear instantaneously out of nowhere, as soon as the level of uptake of Green OA reaches a level at which it causes a dramatic collapse of subscriptions.

Not at all, and it is extremely important that we understand one another on this point, for it is crucial to understanding the causal and temporal dynamic of the Green/Gold complementarity:

No, new Gold OA journals need not appear instantaneously out of nowhere: it is existing journals that will be forced to convert to Gold OA if and when Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable. 

If and when universally mandated Green OA begins to cause cancellation pressure on subscriptions, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that the effect will be an immediate dramatic collapse. Nor does it require any new journals to replace the existing ones. Cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting and the phasing out of inessential products and services by the existing journals. The first of these cuts will of course be the print edition itself. But it will not stop there, for cancellations are predicated on the fact that users are ready to rely on the Green version -- the refereed final draft, self-archived in the distributed network of IRs. That means the next thing to be phased out will be access-provision and archiving. That will leave peer review as the sole remaining service that a journal needs to provide.

This is definitely not the case with Gold OA publishing today: Some or all of these extra products/services and their expenses are bundled into the current asking price for Gold OA. That -- together with the fact that the potential institutional money to pay for Gold OA is still tied up in institutional subscriptions -- is what makes Gold OA a deterrent for OA mandate growth today. And it is precisely the gradual increase of cancellation pressure as Green OA grows that will force the downsizing and cost-cutting that will in turn make Gold OA affordable, while also releasing the subscription funds to pay for it.

Moreover, a conversion to universal Gold OA does not at all mean adding 25,000 new Gold OA journals to replace the 25,000 existing subscription journals, as some seem to imagine (again without really trying to think it through). It is a matter of converting the existing journals to Gold, as they phase out their now-obsolete products and services (because of Green OA IRs) and downsize to peer review (and its far lower cost) alone, under cancellation pressure on their own journals. And of course the journal titles, refereeships, authorships and track-records of the journals currently published by any publishers who may no longer be interested in staying in the business if they need to downsize to just peer review on the Gold OA model will simply migrate to other publishers that are interested, just as journal titles migrate today, for many different reasons.

What is also likely to shrink or even disappear alongside this downsizing and conversion to Gold OA under cancellation pressure generated by Green OA is fleet publishing of multiple journals: The current mounting complaints about Gold-OA journal-fleet start-ups that spam authors and referees, with ill-matched and unqualified referees -- and similar shoddy refereeing practices among subscription-based journal-fleet publishers -- are likely to put an end to the practice of fleet publishing altogether in the Gold OA era. All a journal needs, once all it is providing is peer review, is a qualified editor selecting qualified referees and competently adjudicating the reports and revisions. A part-time editorial assistant and powerful online software can handle the mechanics of submission and revision flow. And all of that is what the Gold OA peer-review charges will pay for. There is no real need to be part of a fleet of unrelated journals in order to provide that service.

MC: Surely the progressive, side-by-side development of Green OA repositories, and the Gold OA journals needed (by your own acknowledgement) to make a fully open model of peer-reviewed scholarly communication long-term sustainable in the absence of subscriptions, is preferable for all concerned to the dramatic crisis-driven transition which you envision?

On the contrary. The gradual cost-cutting and conversion of the existing, established journals to peer-review alone, under cancellation pressure from the new reality of universal Green OA, is precisely what is needed to get us from here to there. Neither today's Gold OA journals' products nor their prices reflect what post-Green-OA publishing will be like; nor can today's Gold OA journals do just performing peer review alone until the network of Green OA repositories is sufficiently widespread to be able to take over all access-provision and archiving. Nor will today's subscription journals downsize and convert spontaneously, without the cancellation pressure.

So whether one's goal is just immediate universal Green OA or an eventual transition to sustainable, affordable universal Gold OA, the path to it is via Green OA mandates, not the creation of more and more new Gold OA journals trying to compete with established subscription journals at current prices with today's co-bundled products and services. If that were the only hope of reaching universal OA, we'd still have a long, long wait ahead of us.

Fortunately, it is beginning to look as if all that's needed is to straighten out a few persistent misunderstanding about how to implement OA mandates effectively -- which includes gaining a much clearer understanding of the causal and temporal dynamics of the complementarity between Green and Gold OA -- and the wait (for both universal Green OA and the subsequent transition to universal Gold OA) will not be that long.

Stevan Harnad

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From: Stevan Harnad
Sent: 24 June 2009 12:17
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM -- LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: BioMed Central Press Release

On 24-Jun-09, at 5:01 AM, Charlotte Webber (BioMed Central) wrote in the press release appended in full after this posting):

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) now requires authors to publish research results into open access journals and also encourages dual submission into an institutional repository.

I invite readers to review the CIHR policy below and judge whether the above is an accurate description of the policy or self-serving spin by a commercial journal publisher (and IR service-provider) promoting its product:

CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs: http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/34846.html

-- Grant recipients are now required to make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible through the Publisher's website (Option #1) or an online repository as soon as possible and in any event within six months of publication (Option #2).

-- Under the second option, grant recipients must archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts immediately upon publication in a digital archive, such as PubMed Central or the grantees institutional repository.

-- Publications must be freely accessible within six months of publication, where allowable and in accordance with publisher policies...

-- Grant recipients may also wish to submit their manuscripts to a journal that provides immediate open access to published articles (if a suitable journal exists). CIHR considers the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.

Yes, the difference between the reality and the spin makes a difference: a considerable difference. The underlying issue is always the same: Should priority be given to requiring Green OA self-archiving of all journal articles to make them OA, or to publishing articles in Gold OA journals to make them OA?

No institution or funder on the planet "requires authors to publish research results into open access journals"!

This is wishful thinking on the part of the publishers of open access journals. And when put in the way it is put in this BMC Press Release, it generates confusion at a time when OA mandates are still few and what is needed is clarity, not self-serving spin by commercial publishers promoting their Gold OA journals.

Of lesser consequence, but worthy of note, are two further points related to the BMC press release:

(1)  "[T]he University's Supporter Membership with BioMed Central" is an incoherent (and self-serving) subscription-like notion that (if anyone gives it just a moment's careful thought) cannot scale to the day when many, most or all journals and publishers are Gold OA (10,000 universities "joining" the publishers of 25,000 journals with individual annual memberships). "Membership" only gives the illusion of making any sense at all today, when a few Gold-OA journal-fleet publishers like BMC (now part of Springer) are promoting it to short-sighted and serials-stressed librarians: http://bit.ly/g62wK

(2) Re: "BioMed Central's "Open Repository" system... using BioMed Central's extensive open access knowledge and technology experience":  I am of course all for promoting Institutional Repositories (IRs); but one cannot but feel a touch sceptical about the notion of a commercial Gold OA publisher "promoting" IRs when IRs are -- and let us state this quite openly -- fundamentally in conflict with their primary commercial mission, which is to promote their Gold OA product. Green OA simply means author self-archiving of articles published in any journal at all -- and most journals are non-OA journals, let alone BMC journals. Hence it is inescapable that Green OA self-archiving is in competition with Gold OA publishing at this time.

(Green OA will no longer be in competition with Gold OA once Green OA mandates have prevailed globally, and if and when the resulting universal Green OA eventually induces a universal transition to Gold OA by making subscriptions unsustainable. But today, for Gold OA publishers, promoting Green OA means promoting a rival means of providing OA itself, and, especially for commercial Gold OA publishers, that would be a bad business strategy. "Don't buy my product, because you can get it elsewhere for free." Hence the spin you see above.)

Full Disclosure: I promote and very strongly endorse University of Southampton's "rival" IR system (Eprints); but Eprints is noncommercial, free, and has, and always has had, only one agenda, which is to promote universal Green OA, as quickly and as effectively as possible. "Eprints Services," fee-based, is only offered, reluctantly, as an option for those institutions who insist that they do not wish to set up Eprints on their own, for free; and Eprints Services revenues are used solely to sustain and promote the use of the free software, and Green OA itself:

Moreover, I would welcome BMC's Open Repository Service as an ally, not a rival, if BMC ORS, too, could dedicate itself to the straightforward promotion of universal Green OA, without the obvious strains of conflict-of-interest evident in this press release.

Stevan Harnad

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News release from BioMed Central
24 June 2009
 
"Canadian Excellence" strengthened by extensive adoption of open access

Wilfrid Laurier University adopts Open Repository and BioMed Central Membership

Open access movement gains ground in North America
 
BioMed Central and Wilfrid Laurier University today announce the launch of Laurier IR, an institutional repository that provides a visible point of open access archiving of intellectual output for all members of the University community.
 
Built on BioMed Central's "Open Repository" system and using BioMed Central's extensive open access knowledge and technology experience, Laurier IR is a personalized in-house repository that will significantly increase access to the university's scholarly information and also highlight the talent of the Universities researchers and students.
 
Laurier University is just one many organizations globally that have adopted Open Repository since its inception. Open Repository is built upon DSpace, an open-source solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly material.

In addition, the University's Supporter Membership with BioMed Central reduces the barriers for Laurier researchers publishing in BioMed Central's open-access journals by providing researchers with a 15 percent discount on the article processing charges.
 
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) now requires authors to publish research results into open access journals and also encourages dual submission into an institutional repository. Complying with this mandate and also heeding wider position statements from bodies such as the Canadian Library Association (CLA) necessitated Wilfrid Laurier University to establish Laurier IR.
 
Laurier IR embraces the 'open access' movement by allowing authors to submit their original research directly to the repository.  Electronic documents, including articles, pre-prints, monographs, reports, movies and databases can all be archived in the repository.
 
The service ensures that Laurier's scholarly communication output is consolidated, thus enabling researchers to broaden their knowledge base through greater collaboration and also providing a central point to store teaching support materials across the Laurier community.
 
Laurier University aims to build a full community structure for their repository within the next 12 months which will include customized designs and collections for particular groups of researchers. They also hope to implement a 'content recruitment strategy' to ensure that as much scholarly output from the university as possible is held with the repository.
 
Speaking of the continued development of Laurier IR said "Laurier is excited to be developing an institutional repository" said Dr. Deborah MacLatchy, Vice-President: Academic and Provost at Laurier. "It will be an excellent way for other scholars, as well as students and professionals, to access scholarly and creative works and theses published by Laurier faculty and students. It increases Laurier's presence internationally and extends our scholarly output to a much wider audience, such as researchers in the developing world."
 
-ENDS-
Media Contact
Matt McKay
Head of PR
BioMed Central
 
Tel:  +44 (0) 203 1922 2216
Mob: +44 (0) 7825 257 423
Email: matthew.mckay@biomedcentral.com
 
Notes to Editors:
 
1. BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector.
 
2. For more information on the Laurier Open Research Archive, contact project manager Debbie Chaves at dchaves@wlu.ca
 
3. Open Repository (http://www.openrepository.com/) is a service from BioMed Central to build, launch, host and maintain institutional repositories for organisations. Built upon the latest DSpace repository software the service has been designed to be flexible and cost-effective. BioMed Central's economy of scale makes it possible for organisations that could not otherwise afford to, or lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house to run their own repositories.

ETD 2009   June 10, Pittsburgh

12th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations:

PROGRAM

Integrating University Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates

Stevan Harnad
Université du Québec à Montréal & University of Southampton

Full text: PDF
Appendices: Harnad PowerPoint slides

Abstract: A growing number of universities are beginning to mandate the digital deposit of their thesis and dissertation output in their institutional repositories. At the same time, a growing number of universities as well as research funders are beginning to mandate that all refereed research must be deposited too. This makes for a timely synergy between the practices of the younger and older generation of researchers as the Open Access era unfolds. It also maximizes the uptake, usage and impact of university research output at all stages, as well as providing rich and powerful new metrics to monitor and reward research productivity and impact. It is important to integrate universities' ETD and research output repositories, mandates and metrics as well as to provide the mechanism for those deposits that may need to be made Closed Access rather than Open Access: Repositories need to implement the "email eprint request" Button for all Closed Access Deposits. Any would-be user webwide, having reached the metadata of a Closed Access Deposit can, with one click, request an eprint for research purposes; the author instantly receives an automatic email and can then, again with one click, authorize the automatic emailing of one copy to the user by the repository software. This feature is important for fulfilling immediate research usage needs during any journal-article embargo period, and it also gives the authors of dissertations they hope to publish as books a way to control who has access to the dissertation. Digital dissertations will also benefit from the reference-linking and book-citation metrics that will be provided by harvesters of the distributed institutional repository metadata (which will also include the metadata and reference lists of all university book output). Dissertation downloads as well as eprint-requests will also provide useful new research impact metrics.

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SUMMARY: Contrary to the suggestion of this RCUK report, there is no "Gold Standard" for OA except universal OA, and the way to universalize OA is to universalize Green OA self-archiving mandates to all institutions and funders globally, not to divert scarce research money -- pre-emptively and needlessly -- toward paying Gold OA publication fees at a time when subscription fees are still paying for publication worldwide and only 77 out of 10,000 institutions and funders have yet mandated Green OA. The problem is not that Green OA mandates are failing to achieve compliance, as this RCUK report suggests. The problem is that they have not yet been adopted by 99.23% of the world's institutions and funders!
    Unlike "peer-to-peer" consumer "sharing" of creators' non-give-away commercial output, creators giving away their own peer-reviewed and publicly funded research output to maximize its uptake, usage and impact is not piracy but the sharing of a public good for public benefit. In contrast, publisher embargoes on research access are the hostage-taking of a public good -- and the way to counter that is immediate-deposit (IDOA) mandates coupled with the "Email EPrint Request" Button, not the payment of a gold ransom (nor, while we're at it, the equally gratuitous burden of formal hostage-rights-retention negotiations).

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Comments on:
Open Access to Research Outputs: Final Report to Research Councils UK

Once they have mandated Green OA self-archiving (as all 7 of the RCUK funding councils have now done), what funders do with their spare cash is entirely their own business.

But it does seem as profligate as it is unnecessary to propose squandering scarce research money today on paying Gold OA publishing fees pre-emptively while Green OA mandates are still so few and subscription fees are still paying for publication.

This RCUK report shows signs of having been drafted under two palpable influences: (1) the publishers' lobby, striving to ensure that, whatever the outcome, revenues for publishers are maximized and immunized against risk -- and (2) the publishing reform movement, striving to ensure that publishers convert to Gold OA at all costs.

If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate Green OA for now, and then let supply and demand decide, given universal Green OA, whether and when to convert from subscriptions to Gold OA, and for what product, and at what price.

Context:

With non-OA journals, subscriptions pay the costs of publication.

With fee-based OA journals, author publication fees pay the costs of publication.

Green OA mandates require authors to deposit their published articles on the web, free for all.

Gold OA means the journal makes the articles free for all on the web.

The goal of the open access movement is open access to research, in order to maximize research uptake, impact and progress. Universal Green OA mandates from funders (like RCUK) and universities are all that is needed to ensure universal OA.

Universal Green OA may or may not eventually lead to subscription cancellations and a transition to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. If and when it does, the windfall subscription cancellation savings themselves will be more than enough to pay for the much-reduced costs of providing peer-review alone (which will be the only product that peer-reviewed journals will still need to provide), with never the need to redirect a single penny from the dwindling pot that funds research itself.

(That publication costs would only amount to 2% of research costs is a specious calculation, when one fails to take into account that publication costs are still being fully covered by subscription payments today, while many research proposals recommended for funding by reviewers are going unfunded because there is not enough money in the research pot to cover them. Nor is there any need whatsoever for researchers to publish in fee-based Gold OA journals if their objective is to provide OA for their work: Green OA self-archiving already provides that.)

The effects of pre-emptive Gold fever today are (i) to distract from the urgent need for universal Green OA mandates, (ii) to encourage a needless waste of scarce research funds, and (iii) to facilitate the locking-in of today's asking-prices for goods and services (print edition, publisher's PDF, storage, dissemination) that will almost certainly be obsolete by the time Gold OA's day really comes, once universal Green OA has become the access-provider (and archiver).

The publishers are just doing what any business will do to try to sustain and maximize its habitual revenues; it is the pre-emptive publishing reformers who are being foolish and short-sighted, needlessly conflating the urgent and important research accessibility problem with the journal affordability problem, not realizing that if they solve the former, the latter loses all its apparent urgency and importance.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum