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Friday, July 27. 2007"Permission Barriers" are a red herring for OA: Keystrokes are our only real barrier
Klaus Graf writes:
"1. time of free access (the embargo-question): This is the only question Stevan Harnad is interested in. If we can call the OA-FREE journals of DOAJ 'OA' we should also... call [self-archived articles that are] freely accessible articles after an embargo 'OA'."This is incorrect. OA means immediate, permanent, free, full-text access online to published journal articles, webwide. ("Immediate" means immediately upon acceptance for publication.) Hence embargoed access means embargoed access, not OA. I am interested in OA but it has become quite evident across the past 13 years that not nearly enough authors make their articles OA spontaneously, of their own accord (only about 15% do), despite its demonstrated benefits. It is also quite evident that the only real barrier to 100% OA is the keystrokes that it takes to deposit the article and its metadata into the author's Institutional Repository. It is for this reason that my own focus is currently on (1) institutional (and research funder) mandates that ensure that those keystrokes are executed as a matter of institutional/funder policy and on (2) developing the OA metrics that will quantify and reward those benefits. Administrative deposit mandates of course only ensure deposit, not OA. But the benefits of OA themselves will ensure that all those deposits will be made free as worldwide deposits approach 100%, and new deposits will not long thereafter be OA ab ovo. ![]() American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, June 14. 2007On Patience, and Letting (Human) Nature Take Its CourseSUMMARY: Peter Murray-Rust is anxious to ensure that all research data should be harvestable and data-mineable, by man and machine alike. He worries that authors might instead agree to transfer copyright to their publishers for their data (as many already transfer it for their article texts) in exchange for the publisher's green light to self-archive. Not to worry. If authors don't self-archive their data at all today, when they hold all the rights, nor do 85% of them self-archive their articles (not even the 62% for which they already have their publisher's green light), then why on earth would they transfer copyright for their data in exchange for a green light to self-archive both? So first things first: Focus on ensuring OA for all article texts (postprints) by first mandating immediate deposit (in the author's Institutional Repository) of all postprints as soon as they are accepted for publication (without necessarily insisting that access to those deposits be immediately set to OA). All else will follow from that simple step, as surely as day follows night. OA is just a matter of keystrokes. Peter Murray-Rust (P-MR) writes: "I don’t disagree... [with] Stevan’s analysis of how we should deposit papers... I’m just more interested in data at present...Make no mistake about it: Peter Murray-Rust (and Peter Suber) and I are all in total agreement about the goals, and in near-total agreement about the means. PMR is especially concerned about research data harvesting and mining, which is not, strictly speaking, an OA matter, for two reasons: (1) OA's primary target is research article texts. (That doesn't matter: free online access to data is extremely important too, and is part of OA's wider target.) (2) More important, access to article texts is actually -- or, as I suspect, perceptually -- constrained by publishers' copyright-based restrictions. That is not true of data. So, to a first approximation, authors are perfectly free to make their data OA today if they wish; all they need do is adopt the right Creative Commons License for it and then self-archive it in their Institutional repository (IR). If they don't make their data OA, it's their own fault, not the fault of publisher restrictions, actual or perceived. PMR is worried that authors, instead of self-archiving their data, will instead transfer copyright for their data to their publishers, in exchange for their publishers adopting a Green policy. But I think PMR is misunderstanding a Green publisher policy here! Green publishers don't make their published matter OA; they merely bless the author's making it OA, if he wishes, by self-archiving it. The only publishers that make their own published matter OA are Gold OA publishers. So what is the motivation for the copyright scenario PMR is worried about? Authors, who today cannot be bothered to self-archive their own data at all, and cannot be bothered to self-archive their articles either (and/or are too bothered by actual or perceived publisher's restrictions to do so) will henceforth, according to this scenario, adopt the brand-new practice of transferring copyright for their data (along with their articles) -- in exchange for their publishers going Green! But why on earth would authors do that? What is the motivation? They can't be bothered self-archiving their data today, when they don't need their publisher's blessing (or greenery) to do it, just as most of them can't be bothered to self-archive their articles, even when they have their Green publishers' (62%) blessing to do so. Yet, for some unknown reason, these passive authors are to be imagined (in PMR's scenario) as being ready to transfer copyright for their undeposited data to their publishers, in exchange for their publishers' agreeing to give them the green light to self-archive their data (and articles)! I think this fantasized scenario misses the point completely, and that point is precisely the one that PMR confesses he is less interested in, namely, that what is needed to get these passive authors to do the right thing -- in their own interests, but also in the interests of their institutions, their funders, the public that funds their funders and in whose interests the research is done, and in the interests of research progress and productivity itself -- is a Green OA self-archiving mandate, adopted by their institutions and funders! A mandate that requires them to self-archive, as a condition of employment and funding. I would be quite happy if that self-archiving mandate applied to their data as well as to their articles. But first things first. A mandate first needs to be successfully adopted. And authors are already publishing their articles, but not yet publishing their data. Some may not wish to publish their data (preferring to keep it under wraps so that they, and not their competitors, can mine it); I make no judgment about this, except that co-bundling an article-archiving mandate with a data-archiving mandate would put the successful adoption of any mandate at all at risk, because of these potential exceptions and oppositions. (It is for similar reasons that a mandate to self-archive the refereed, accespted, published postprint is unproblematic, whereas a mandate to also self-archive the unrefereed preprint would be: Not all authors are willing to make their preprints public, nor should they be required to be. But all authors publish their postprints, by definition.) ![]() But -- if we agree that the only thing standing between us and 100% OA (not only for articles, but for data too) is those deposit keystrokes that sluggish, passive authors simply are not doing, unmandated -- then it should also be apparent why ID/OA is exactly what is needed now to get those keystrokes done. ID/OA does not go the whole way: It does not require the Nth (OA) keystroke. But unless we are all deeply deluded about the benefits of OA, OA's own rewards will see to it that those Nth keys get stroked, once the ID/OA mandate has propagated across all of research space, and human nature takes its course. The OA usage/impact advantage, which today can only be demonstrated by painstaking, post-hoc analyses (invariably discounted by the publishing lobby's "Dream Team," committed to arguing that there is no real advantage to OA!), will instead be obvious from the download and citation statistics for Open Access versus Closed Access articles in every Institutional Repository (IR); and the difference will be reinforced by the deluge of email eprint requests generated by the IR software's "Fair Use Button." But once those Nth keystrokes fall, the token will (by the same token!) also fall for those same authors (i.e., all authors!), realizing the potential benefits of depositing their data too. OA will naturally propagate from postprints to (many) preprints and (most) underlying data too. That is why I urge patience, and making common cause with Green OA mandates, for those whose goal is OA data-archiving: that too will come with the territory. And there is no way in the world that authors will instead opt, for no reason at all, to transfer copyright to their publishers for their data too, along with copyright for their texts, in exchange for their publishers giving them the green light to do the self-archiving that they are not bothering to do anyway, with or without a green light! They might agree to transfer data rights to a Gold OA publisher. But that would be no problem, because Gold OA publishers really do make their articles (and hence also their data) accessible online in every way, including for robot harvesting and data-mining. With ID/OA mandates, the next step after 100% postprint deposits (62% OA and 38% Closed Access + semi-automatic Fair-Use eprints) will be the transition to 100% Green OA for all postprints (the Nth keystroke), and then to the depositing of the accompanying data, with rights specified by the CC license the author adopts. That's the natural scenario, and all it needs right now is worldwide propagation of the ID/OA mandate. To achieve that, we must not chafe, for the time being, at the absence of a guarantee of robotic harvesting and mining (for either text or data), because insisting on that now can only blunt the motivation and slow the momentum for the universal adoption of the ID/OA mandate. Let us be patient, get the mandates adopted, and let them do their inexorable work; then the era of 100% OA -- for both text and data -- will not be far behind. You can (data-)bank on that! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, June 12. 2007Get the Institutional Repository Managers Out of the Decision Loop
Peter Murray-Rust [PM-R] replied:The trouble with many Institutional Repositories (IRs) (besides the fact that they don't have a deposit mandate) is that they are not run by researchers but by "permissions professionals," accustomed to being mired in institutional author IP protection issues and institutional library 3rd-party usage rights rather than institutional author research give-aways. The solution is to adopt a sensible institutional (or departmental) deposit mandate and then to automatize the deposit procedure so as to take Repository Managers out of the decision loop, completely. That is what we have done in the Southampton ECS Departmental Repository, and the result is an IR that researchers fill daily, as they complete their papers, without any mediation or meddling by permissions professionals. The author (or the author's designee) does the deposit and sets the access (Open Access or Closed Access) and the EPrints software takes care of the rest. Institutions that have no deposit mandate have simply ceded the whole procedure to IP people who are not qualified even to understand the research access/impact problem, let alone solve it. All they are accustomed to thinking about is restrictions on incoming content, whereas the purpose of an OA IR is to allow researchers to make their own findings -- outgoing content -- accessible to other researchers webwide. The optimal deposit mandate is of course to require Open Access deposit of the refereed final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication. But there is a compromise for the faint-hearted, and that is the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: This is the policy that will remove IP-obsessives from the loop: The full-text and metadata of all articles must be deposited immediately, but access to the full-text is set as Open Access if the publisher is Green (i.e., endorses postprint self-archiving: 62%) and to Closed Access if the publisher is not Green (38%). For the articles published in the non-Green journals, the IR has the semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button (or "Fair Use Button"), which allows any user who has been led by the metadata to a Closed Access article to cut/paste his email address in a box and click to send an automatic email to the author to request a single eprint for research use; the author then need merely click on a URL to authorize the semi-automatic emailing of the eprint. Now, Peter, I counsel patience! You will immediately reply: "But my robots cannot crunch Closed Access texts: I need to intervene manually!" True, but that problem will only be temporary, and you must not forget the far larger problem that precedes it, which is that 85% of papers are not yet being deposited at all, either as Open Access or Closed Access. That is the inertial practice that needs to be changed, globally, once and for all. The only thing standing between us and 100% OA is keystrokes. It is in order to get those keystrokes done, at long last, that we need OA mandates, and ID/OA is a viable interim compromise: It gets all N keystrokes done for 62% of current research, and N-1 of the keystrokes done for the remaining 38%. For that 38%, the "Fair Use Button" will take care of all immediate researcher usage needs for the time being. The robots will have their day once 100% deposit mandates prevail and the research community tastes what it is like to have 62% OA and 38% almost-OA world, at long last. For then those Nth keys will inevitably get stroked, setting everything to Open Access, as it should (and could) have been all along. It is in that keystoke endgame that all publisher resistance will disintegrate (and they know it, which is why they are lobbying so aggressively against keystroke mandates!). But right now, publishers have unwitting accomplices in institutional IP specialists, reflexively locking in the status quo, blithely ignorant or insouciant about what OA is actually about, and for. That is why ID/OA must be allowed to take them out of the loop. Just as I have urged that Gold OA (publishing) advocates should not over-reach ("Gold Fever") -- by pushing directly for the conversion of all publishers and authors to Gold OA, and criticizing and even opposing Green OA and Green OA mandates as "not enough" -- I urge the advocates of automatized robotic data-mining to be patient and help rather than hinder Green OA and Green OA (and ID/OA) mandates. In both cases, it is Green OA that is the most powerful and promising means to the end they seek: 100% ID/OA will eventually drive a transition to 100% Green OA and 100% Green OA will eventually drive a transition to Gold OA. Short-sightedly opposing the Green OA measures now in the name of holding out for "greater functionality" is tantamount to joining forces with IP specialists who have no sense of researchers' daily access needs and impact losses, and are simply holding out for what they think is the perfect formal solution, which is all authors successfully negotiating a copyright agreement that retains their right to make their article OA. First things first. We are HERE now (85% deprived of research content even for non-robotic use). In order to get THERE (100% of research content OA to researchers and robots alike) we first have to get those keystrokes done. Please help, rather than just hope! PM-R: "Some publishers allow posting on green open access on web sites but debar it from repositories."This is the sort abject and arbitrary nonsense that takes one's breath away! Can these publishers define the difference between a website and a repository? They are just ways that disk sectors are labelled. To block such incoherent stipulations Southampton ECS has formally baptized its researchers' repository disk sector as their "personal website." (This is also why I object so vigorously to SHERPA-Romeo's slavish and solemn canonizing of every announced publisher "condition" on deposit, no matter how absurd. I stand ready to hear that there is a new SHERPA-Romeo permissions category, colour-coded "chestnut" for those publishers who do not allow deposit of articles by authors who have maternal uncles with chestnut-coloured irises... Here too we detect the familiar mark of the IP gurus...) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, May 30. 2007OA Mandates, Embargoes, and the "Fair Use" Button
Bernard Rentier, Rector, U Liege, wrote:Authors are entitled to distribute individual copies to reprint/eprint requesters on an individual basis. This is called "Fair Use." It is exactly the same thing that authors have been doing for 50 years, in responding to individual mailed reprint requests, except that these are email eprint requests. You may consult with copyright lawyers if you wish. Fair use is not a right that a copyright transfer agreement can take away from anyone, especially the author! The reply of my colleague Prof. Charles Oppenheim, an expert in these matters. follows below. It is hence important to clear up any lingering misunderstandings that may be making funders and institutions uncertain about whether to adopt or to adopt instead(1) the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate (also called the Dual Deposit/Release Mandate by Peter Suber) Clearly, mandating immediate deposit and allowing the deposit to be Open Access immediately where feasible but Closed Access while there is a publisher embargo period (1) is infinitely preferable to a mandate that allows depositing itself to be embargoed (2).(2) the equivocal "Delayed Deposit Mandate" that many mandators have adopted (essentially leaving it up to publishers when authors should deposit rather than just when they should make the deposit OA). During the embargo, the article's metadata are still visible webwide (author, title, date, journal, etc.), so would-be users who need access immediately for their research can email the author to request a single fair-use copy of the deposit, to be sent by email. Hence it is important for all potential mandators to understand this clearly. This is of course especially pertinent to the "Fair Use" Button that is part of the Institutional Repository's interface. If a would-be user reaches a Closed Access deposit, they can cut/paste their email address into a box, and click on the "Fair Use" Button, which sends an automatic email request to the author, asking for authorization to email one individual eprint to the requester, for personal research use. The author can then just click on a URL to authorize the emailing of that individual eprint. The Fair Use Button is for an individual researcher's individual research papers, as the form-request should clearly state. LB: - under UK law copying by anyone other than the copyright owner under the 1988 Act must generally be for research or private study, for non-commercial purposes.As above. LB:- where distribution of "reprints" is by some digital format then only the owner of copyright in the reprint (who may not be the author) can authorise the copying and distribution IF it is for commercial purposes.As above. LB:This would, I think, prevent an author who has assigned copyright from making or authorising the copying and sending of an item to someone IF the intended use is for commercial purposes (e.g. an author, who is not the copyright owner, could not send the published version to someone working in a pharmaceutical company's research laboratory). However, arcane this may seem, it is (in my view) the legal position.It is indeed arcane and seems to have nothing to do with the topic at hand (and the rationale for Open Access), which is individual research use for research purposes. LB: Charles, I believe, is referring to section 29(3) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. That section permits one person to copy something on behalf on someone else in certain circumstances - and as long as it is for research or private study for non-commercial purposes.The only Fair Use Button directs the request to the author, who is the only one who can authorize the sending. It is my impression that rights expertise is so focussed on the formal that it has lost sight of the functional: OA has nothing to do with commercial rights, either formally or functionally. It is about researcher use of research for research. That's the whole point. And that's why peer-reviewed research publication never belonged under the trade publication banner, with its many unwanted (for the researcher-author) "protections." In the Gutenberg era, the protections were reluctantly accepted by the researcher-author, who sought only impact, and never income, because the income was nonetheless needed by the paper publisher in order to cover true paper production and distribution costs. Otherwise there could be no publication (hence no impact) at all. But in the PostGutenberg era the web makes it possible for the the researcher-author to supplement paper distribution with online distribution (self-archiving). (It also makes it possible to reduce all publication costs to just the costs of managing peer review, but that is not the issue here.) The Fair Use Button is for the authors of those articles that are publishing in that 38% of journals that still attempt to resist this obvious benefit for research and researchers made possible by the online medium. Instead of making the self-archived text immediately free for all upon acceptance for publication lie the authors in the 62% of journals that are Green, the remaining authors can use the Free Use Button until online access embargoes die their inevitable natural death. The Button makes it possible for research to improve all of our lives without having to wait. QEDHarnad, Stevan (2001/2003) For Whom the Gate Tolls?LB: Where authors own the copyright or are using a version other than the publisher's final one then they can authorise what they want through any button and whatever the button is called. I expect that one can waive one's right to breath air too, if one is silly enough to agree to do so, but that, too, is not the point under discussion here... Yes, for simply emailing eprints, it makes no difference whether the author emails a copy of the publisher's PDF or the author's accepted final draft (postprint). It also makes no difference which version is sent via the Institutional Repository's "Fair Use" Button, in the case of articles that have been deposited as Closed Access instead of OA because of publisher access embargoes. But where it makes a huge difference is in institutional and funder self-archiving (Green OA) mandates. The default version that should be mandated for deposit is the author's final draft, not the publisher's PDF. The reason is that the author's final draft has far fewer restrictions imposed on it. (In other words, far more publishers endorse author self-archiving of the publisher's final draft, and far more publishers endorse immediate, unembargoed setting of access to the deposit of that draft as OA rather than Closed Access.) So, if the publisher does happen to formally endorse immediate, unembargoed self-archiving of the publisher's proprietary PDF, it's fine to self-archive that. But the default version that mandates should specify for all other cases is the publisher's final draft. By the way, the difference between the publisher's PDF and the author's final draft means next to nothing for those would-be users who currently have no access at all. Hence it would be absurd to keep on depriving them of access in order to hold out for a difference that makes no difference. It would in principle be possible to deposit both the author's final draft and the publisher's PDF, the latter always in Closed Access, and, whenever a user requests an eprint via the Fair Use Button, always to send the PDF rather than the author's postprint. I would say that at a point in time when 85% of articles are not being deposited at all, any which way, and most institutions and funders have yet to adopt deposit mandates, this would be an example of a needless overcomplication, discouraging rather than accelerating progress. Both authors and their institutions and funders do best to forget about depositing the publisher's PDF at all, except in the specific cases where it has been endorsed by the publisher for immediate OA (and the author prefers to do so). I not only prefer to deposit my final draft, but in addition to depositing it, I sometimes also deposit postpublication updates and corrections (clearly tagged as such!) of the published version, which would in any case supersede the PDF." Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, May 16. 2007Should a Viable Journal Convert to Green or to Gold Today?The following query has been anonymized: Anon.: "Journal [JX] has a useful (but declining) revenue stream for the hard copy version. At the moment authors have to wait for 1 year before being permitted to put up their published papers on their own website. I'd like to see JX go OA and was hoping that all the UK Research Councils would insist on this for any papers published as a result of public money distributed in the form of research grants."At this point in time it makes much more sense for a journal like JX to (1) go Green on author OA self-archiving than to convert to (2) OA Gold publishing. (1) Going Green means endorsing immediate author self-archiving (no embargo). (2) Going Gold means either: Going Green entails some possibility of risk to subscriptions, but that is unlikely to be significant -- it has not caused detectable cancellations for the other 62% of journals that are Green, including the physics journals that have been Green longest (over a decade) and some of whose contents have been 100% self-archived for years now.(2a) making the entire online edition free for all and continuing to sell the hard copy edition for subscriptions, as now, or Going Gold via (2a) would be far riskier, and needlessly so, than going Green (1), because Green OA grows anarchically, article by article, whereas Gold OA is total and immediate for the journal. Going hybrid Gold via (2b) would essentially be to make a gratuitous extra author charge for self-archiving -- a highly retrogressive step (unless also coupled with going Green), while continuing to sell the hard copy edition for subscriptions. And (2c) would be to needlessly jettison the hard copy edition and subscription revenue pre-emptively, for no particular reason. JX should go Green and then wait to see what happens. Green might eventually propel all journals to (2c), but it certainly won't do it to JX alone, nor soon. (Going Green (1) and hybrid Gold (2b) is also a reasonable option, though you will not have many takers for optional Gold, with or without mandates, unless the fee is negligibly low.) Anon.: "However, I'm told that EPSRC is holding out, for the moment, against OA as a result of protests from [Society SX] and [Society SY] that they'll be in serious trouble if they lose the revenue stream from their hard copy journals (but in the end this is going to happen anyway it seems to me ...)"It is not entirely clear why EPSRC is holding out against mandating Green OA. Whatever the reason, it's a bad and counterproductive one, for research, and if SX and/or SY are behind it, all three ought to be named and shamed. In any case, I agree that Green OA is going to happen anyway. Anon.: "Can you confirm that this is the case? Are EPSRC the only refuseniks? What about MRC?"Five of the 7 UK research councils have already mandated Green OA (including the MRC). The only two holdouts are EPSRC and AHRC (and AHRC are considering adopting a Green OA mandate). EPSRC have instead decided to wait for the outcome of a long-term "study" of the impact of mandating Green. (Nonsense, of course, because the only way to study its effects is to mandate it.) Anon.: "As you can imagine UK publicly-funded researchers who want to submit to [JX] are more likely to be getting money from EPSRC than any other of the Councils so this is the one I really need to know about."Sorry I don't know any more -- except that there is a chance that the UK universities may also mandate Green OA (as a few, such as Southampton and Brunel have already done). In that case, whether or not they are funded by EPSRC, UK authors will all be self-archiving, no matter what journal they publish in. And of course there is also the European ERC Green OA mandate, and the prospect of more mandates, worldwide. Anon.: "Any other insight(s) gratefully received." ![]() Anon.: "Sorry to bother you again but it's been drawn to my attention that that [the publisher (PX) of Journal JX already has a hybrid-Gold "Open Choice" policy of selling OA as an option to the author-institution, by the article, for a fee, but PX otherwise embargoes author self-archiving for a year.]I think the answer is already implicit in what I recommended above: Optional Gold (2b) is only justified and welcome if the publisher's policy is also Green on immediate author self-archiving (1) (i.e., should the author elect not to opt for the Gold OA option). Otherwise, with a self-archiving embargo, Optional Gold is a Trojan Horse, to be rejected decisively. As to the asking price for optional-Gold: this currently varies between $500 and $3000 per article and tends to be reckoned by calculating the journal's annual revenue and dividing it by the annual number of articles. A self-serving figure, of course. (If and when Green OA eventually causes subscriptions to become unsustainable, it will not only release the institutional subscription funds to be used instead to pay for Gold OA publishing charges, but it will also drive those charges down to a fair and realistic price -- probably just the cost of implementing peer review. So Caveat Pre-Emptor!) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, May 4. 2007Librarians Applauding Embargoes on Open Access to Research Findings?On Thu, 3 May 2007, Rick Anderson (RA), Director of Resource Acquisition, University of Nevada-Reno Libraries, wrote in liblicense, regarding the newly announced Russian and Turkish Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates: RA: "Bravo in particular to the Russian institution, whose policy allows for a reasonable embargo period."(1) It is odd (and rather sad) to see a librarian applauding an embargo on researchers' access to research findings. (2) The Russian ROARMAP entry says this: There is some linguistic ambiguity there, which I wrote to ask Professor Parinov to clarify (see his replies below). My guess was that CEMI is anxious to have the pre-refereeing preprints deposited too, and so what the director meant here was that if an economist writes a paper, it needs to be deposited within 6 months of its completion.All researchers of the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences are mandated by a director's decree to immediately deposit their papers/articles in the institutional Open Archive. Reply from Prof. Parinov: "The CEMI OA self-archiving mandate policy means exactly this. Any completed research has to be deposited for public access within 6 months of completion, even if it still has the status of a pre-refereeng preprint at that time."Hence this is not a reference to embargoing access to the final, refereed draft (the postprint). I also asked Prof. Parinov to clarify: (a) whether the statement meant that the clock starts at the moment of the completion of the preprint [Prof. Parinov's reply: "Exactly"], (b) whether the postprint must be deposited immediately on acceptance [Prof. Parinov: "Yes]", and (c) whether, if access to the postprint is not immediately set to "Open Access," then the "Fair Use Button" (allowing for semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUESTS) will be implemented to cover any research usage needs during any Closed Access embargo period. [Prof. Parinov: "Yes. We have in our "to-do" plan an implementation of such an "eprint request" button]."(Economics has an established preprint self-archiving practice analogous to that in physics. In no field is it possible, or advisable, to force authors to make their unrefereed drafts public if they do not wish to. Hence my guess is that the 6-month window is intended more to ensure that completed papers are submitted for publication, rather than sat upon. In other words, it is just a manifestation of "publish or perish.") RA: "The policy of the Turkish institution is presented much more sketchily in ROARMAP":Again, the Turkish statement could be made clearer, specifying that the deposit should be immediately upon acceptance of the refereed final draft (postprint) and that "legal objections", if any, pertain only to the date of access-setting (Open Access vs. Closed Access), not to the date of the deposit itself, which should be done immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Again, the Fair Use Button can tide over research usage needs during any embargo period.)Require... researchers to deposit a copy of all their Masters and Ph.D. theses, published and refereed articles in the Institutional Repository of Middle East Technical University, if there are no legal objections..."So there may be also be sufficient flexibility in the Turkish model to allow for commercial publishing prior to the OA deposit, but it's not at all clear." "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:Let me close with a personal observation: I have criticised (some) librarians for being part of the problem rather than the solution insofar as OA is concerned. I think that is still very true, but perhaps misleading, because it is equally true that some librarians are not only part of the solution, but leaders of the worldwide OA movement toward the optimal and inevitable solution. (Prominent examples are Hélène Bosc of Euroscience, Eloy Rodriques of Minho, Derek Law of Glasgow; there are many, many others too.) And history will make it clear that the real problem that delayed OA for well over a decade beyond the time when it was already fully within reach was not those in the library community who favored embargoing OA (or ignoring OA altogether); nor was it "legal objections." The historic cause of the unnecessary and conterproductive delay was the vast majority (85%) of the research community itself -- the very one ones who are both the providers and the beneficiaries of OA. Their causal role can best be described as inertial inaction. That is why mandates by their institutions and their funders became necessary at all. Applauding access embargoes strikes me as a paradigmatic example of the regressive role of some parts of the library community. But researchers sitting on their hands until the keystrokes were mandated trumps that several times over: "...why did the Give-Away authors not flock to the new medium, and the free, open, global access to their work that it would provide? This is what next year's millennium is poised to chide us for. There are some excuses, but at bottom it will be seen to be the sluggishness of human nature and its superstitious cleavage to old habits." (D-lib Magazine 1999)(I shall abstain from the inevitable ensuing round of speculation and counterspeculation about the destruction of journal publishing if immediate OA self-archiving is mandated: It is in order to moot and thereby bypass all of that idle conjecturing -- and equally idle "legal objections" -- that the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access compromise mandate plus the Fair Use Button were designed.) "The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, April 29. 2007Cure Gold Fever With Green DepositsBill Hooker has already corrected the two main misunderstandings in Matt Hodgkinson's posting: ![]() (2) All articles deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) will be harvested and indexed by OAIster, Google Scholar, and many other harvesters and search engines. There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited. The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited (i.e., 85% of the annual peer-reviewed journal literature) and the solution is to mandate Green OA -- or, failing that, to mandate ID/OA. Hence 100% Green OA will indeed have delivered OA's goal, irrespective of whether and when it goes on to lead to Gold OA. A few other points: (3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep fussing about Gold OA and costs while daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact continues to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can put an end to it. My objection to Gold fever is a matter of immediate priorities. It is not only putting the Golden cart before the Green horse (or counting the Golden chickens before the Green eggs are laid), but it is leaving us year in and year out at a near-standstill, whereas self-archiving mandates have been demonstrated to fast-forward universities toward 100% OA for their output within two years. (See Arthur Sale's splendid studies.) (4) I criticise the CERN Gold OA initiative for much the same reason: CERN could have done so much more. CERN has a successful Green OA mandate (not even the ID/OA compromise) and CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields. (Saving subscription costs is utterly irrelevant once you have 100% Green OA: Journal subscriptions then become optional luxury items instead of basic necessities, as now.) (5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal like Springer's Open Choice is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs, and hence doubly foolish. (Rationalizing that it can be corrected by "adjustments" in the subscription price is not only credulous in the extreme, but it blithely countenances locking in current asking-prices in a way that makes the "Big Deal" look like chump change.) Paying for Gold OA in a pure-Gold journal (like the BMC and PLoS journals) -- when one can simply publish in any journal and self-archive to provide OA -- is merely foolish (except for those with a lot of spare change). (At this time: not if and when 100% Green OA causes unsustainable institutional subscription cancellations, thereby releasing the funds to pay for institutional Gold OA publishing costs. (But -- speculation again -- it is likely that journals will have to cut costs and downsize in converting to Gold OA, so the asking price for Gold OA will not be what it is now.) (6) I do not criticise depositing in Central Repositories (CRs) per se (though I do think it is foolish): I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), and I especially criticise mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs. Institutions are the primary research providers. IRs tile all of OA output space. Institutions and their researchers have a shared interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their own research output. Institutions can mandate, monitor (and even monetarize) self-archiving in their own IRs (and funders can reinforce those mandates); CRs cannot. And CRs can harvest from IRs if they wish. Mandating self-archiving in researchers' own IRs is the systematic and scaleable -- hence optimal -- solution for generating 100% OA, not a panoply of arbitrary CRs criss-crossing research space. (7) I have no interest in vying for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art. I don't doubt that the descriptor "open access" can be googled before the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative decided (quite consciously, after surveying several alternatives) to adopt OA for the movement to which it subsequently gave rise. Before the BOAI, there was no OA movement, just a lot of notions in the air, among them: free online access, self-archiving, and journals funded by means other than the subscription model. (8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it, at the current rate. Green OA, in contrast, can be accelerated to reach 100% within two years, if we just go ahead and mandate it, instead of continuing to fuss about Gold OA! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, April 28. 2007Green OA Self-Archiving Needs a Lobbying OrganisationFour basic kinds of OA-related events keep being arranged periodically by various official organisations (librarians, universities, publishers, funders, government committees): (1) Librarians and universities who think OA is all about journal affordability, preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI);There is no recognized topic of (Green) OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group recognized or invited to any of these OA events. So only two recourses are left to Green OA advocates: One is to do as we are doing, which is to keep on raising our voices on behalf of Green OA in writings and petitions and at the meetings we happen to be invited to. The other possibility is the one Richard Poynder and Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted, which is a Green OA lobby. Creating such an official Green OA lobby would be very timely and important (but it would have to be carefully protected against dilution by well-meaning but blinkered proponents of (1), (2) and (3), which would defeat both its focus and its purpose). One good thing, though: The fact (sub specie aeternitatis) is that (1) - (X), are, respectively, (1) irrelevant, (2) premature, (3) premature, and (X) obsolete, and it is indeed Green OA and Green OA mandates that will win the day and usher in 100% OA, sooner or later. Let us work to make it sooner, rather than later. Open Access (OA) means free online access to the articles in the c. 24,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals published annually across all disciplines, countries and languages. The purpose of OA is to maximise research usage and impact, and thereby maximise research productivity and progress, by making all research findings accessible to all their potential users webwide, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happen to be published. There are two roads to 100% OA: (1) The "Golden" Road to OA is to convert all journals from recovering their publishing costs, as they do now, out of user-institution subscription charges, per journal, to recovering their publishing costs instead out of author-institution publication charges, per article. (Gold OA is also called "BOAI-2" -- the second of the two roads to OA proposed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which first adopted the term "Open Access" in 2002 for the new movement it launched.)Gold OA and Green OA are clearly complementary, but there is considerable disagreement over which one should be given priority. The current level of OA worldwide is about 25%, of which about 10% is Gold and 15% is Green. This is because about 10% of journals are Gold (though mostly not the top journals), and because only about 15% of authors self-archive spontaneously. So what is needed is either to increase the proportion of Gold OA journals (and their uptake) to 100%, or to increase the promotion of Green OA self-archiving by authors to 100% (or both). The critical difference in the probability of increasing OA to 100% via Gold versus Green is that Gold OA depends on two further factors: (i) converting journals to Gold and (ii) finding the money to pay authors' Gold OA publication fees (particularly while most journals are subscription-based, and hence most potential publication funds are still tied up in subscriptions). Publishers are reluctant to convert to Gold, and authors are reluctant to pay for Gold OA charges at this time. The situation with Green OA is very different, because it does not depend on converting publishers, and it is virtually cost-free. Most institutions already have Institutional Repositories (IRs). The only problem is that they are largely empty because, as noted, only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously -- even though a series of recent studies have demonstrated OA's dramatic benefits for all fields of scientific and scholarly research (doubled usage and citations). There are, however, the two fundamental advantages of Green OA over Gold OA that were just noted: Gold OA requires (i) converting publishers to Gold OA publishing and it also requires (ii) finding the funds for authors to pay for it. Green OA merely requires authors' own institutions and funders to mandate that they self-archive their own postprints. And Green OA mandates have been repeatedly demonstrated to work. Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.Moreover, if and when mandated 100% OA from Green self-archiving should ever go on to cause journal subscriptions to be cancelled, thereby forcing journals to convert to Gold OA publishing, the cancellations themselves will release the institutional subscription funds that can then be used to pay for institutional authors' Gold OA publication charges. So the pragmatics of the status quo and the goal would seem to indicate that mandating Green OA (by research funders and institutions) should be given priority, rather than focussing on trying to (i) convert journals to Gold OA and trying to (ii) find the funds to pay for it. Journal publishing is in the hands of publishers, but Green OA self-archiving is in the hands of authors and their institutions and funders. Green OA self-archiving mandates are beginning to be adopted by funders and institutions, but not nearly quickly enough, even though they could easily be extended to 100% adoption worldwide. There are two reasons for the delay: (1) lobbying against Green OA mandates by the publishing industry and (2) distraction from mandating Green OA arising from the parallel efforts to promote Gold OA. The pragmatics are clear, however: The research community (researchers, their employers and their funders) have no leverage over the publishing industry and its policies, only over their own employees, fundees and policies. OA is overwhelmingly in the best interests of the research community (as well as students, the vast R&D industry, the developing world, and the tax-paying public worldwide), and the research community itself is in a position to mandate 100% OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving. One cannot mandate Gold OA. The only leverage that publishers have against Green OA mandates is (1) copyright, which they can try to invoke in order to embargo the provision of OA by their authors and (2) their claim that 100% Green OA would make subscriptions unsustainable. As we have seen, (2) is not a valid deterrent to the research community, because if subscriptions did become unsustainable, this would merely mean a conversion to Gold OA publishing, which would be welcome. ![]() Instead of trying to mandate both immediate deposit and immediate OA, funders and universities need merely mandate immediate deposit (of the postprint, immediately upon acceptance for publication). Sixty-two percent of journals already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving, so access to at least 62% of these deposits can immediately be set to OA. For the remaining 38% of journals that have access embargoes, access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access": The metadata (author, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are all openly accessible immediately, webwide, but the full-text of the article (postprint) is not. ![]() The difference between this compromise "almost-OA" and the current status quo is already the difference between night and day for all those would-be users worldwide who cannot afford access to the subscription version. It systematises and automatises email access to the author and the postprint, and it provides the required document almost immediately. And it will very rapidly lead to 100% Green OA, as the universal benefits of OA became palpable to the entire research community. So the research community's optimal strategy is to give priority to the adoption of Green OA mandates by universities and funders. An immediate-deposit, immediate-OA mandate is obviously optimal. But if that cannot be agreed upon immediately, adopting an ID/OA mandate is infinitely preferable to any further delay in adopting a mandate at all. To keep holding out instead for the successful adoption of a stronger Green OA mandate or to wait for a universal transition to Gold OA is merely to continue prolonging the loss in research access, usage and impact, needlessly and avoidably, to the detriment of research productivity and progress. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, April 18. 2007OA or mOre-pAy?Jan Velterop of Springer Open Choice continues to campaign for double-paid OA: With publication costs all paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors pay $3000 extra in order to provide Open-Choice Gold OA for their own article. I continue to advocate that authors self-archive (and that their institutions and funders mandate that they self-archive) their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to provide Green OA. There is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are paying all publication costs. Sixty-two percent of journals (including all 502 Springer journals) already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving. Yet the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates has been delayed far too long already by publishers either lobbying against self-archiving mandates, or adopting self-archiving embargoes, or both. In order to put an end to all further delay in the adoption of self-archiving mandates, publishers need to be taken out of this research-community decision loop altogether. Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which publishers should have no say whatsoever. ![]() ![]() This way we have universal immediate-deposit, now, and almost-immediate almost-OA, now. 100% OA can and will follow soon after. (Note also that such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.) But Jan Velterop (JV) is not concerned about this. He has a product to sell: JV: "It almost looks as if there is a new OA sprout on the stem: 'almost-OA'."No new sprout on the stem: Just a temporary compromise in order to usher in universal self-archiving mandates without any further possibility of delay by publishers. What is strongly recommended is immediate OA self-archiving. But what is mandated is immediate deposit. Universal immediate-deposit mandates mean immediate OA for at least 62% of articles, and, with the help of the "Fair Use" Button, almost-immediate, almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (For the time being. Embargoes will disappear very soon thereafter, under pressure from the powerful, propagating benefits of universal OA.) Jan would like to disparage this in order to promote paying for $3000 Open Choice Gold OA. He is free to promote his product, of course, but he is in competition with good sense, which can be promoted too: JV: "This 'almost-OA', metadata plus a 'fair-use button', has of course been there for a long time already -- almost 15 years, I would say (and much longer if one considers the pre-web era). And it's been there without almost any self-archiving of almost any kind. Go to almost any publisher's web site, and you'll find the metadata for any article, plus a 'fair-use button' (usually, -- dare I say almost always? -- in the guise of an email address represented by an icon that looks like an envelope). Establishing repositories and a deposit mandate may be desired for many reasons, but if their main goal is to achieve 'almost-OA' it rather seems a waste of time and money."Jan misses two fundamental and obvious differences here: (1) Author self-archiving places the article in the author's own Institutional Repository, not a publisher's proprietary paid-access website and (2) the Fair Use Button does not merely offer the author's email address: The requester pastes in his own email address and clicks and the author gets an automatic email with the request and a URL, which he need merely click to have the eprint automatically emailed to the requester. That, dear Jan, is the difference between night and day; the difference between a system whose goal is 100% OA and a system whose goal is to get paid for yet another thing (even when all bills are already paid and all expenses are already covered). No, the immediate-deposit mandate plus the Button is not yet 100% OA. But it's close; and 100% immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button will soon lead to 100% OA. The delayed deposits (or no deposits at all) for which some publishers are lobbying never will. The double-paid Open Choice Gold OA even less so. OA advocates are for OA; just OA. Open-Choice Gold advocates seem more intent on more-pay than OA... JV: "OA publishing, on the other hand, delivers not 'almost-OA', but true and immediate OA (whether or not the articles are deposited in a repository, which is, by the way, automatically done by the full and hybrid OA publishers I am familiar with)."Green OA delivers "true and immediate" OA. It is publisher embargoes that reduce it to almost-OA! But that's fine. The research community will already be incomparably better off with Green OA for 62% of its articles and almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (Springer journals are among the 62% that endorse immediate Green OA, but, before you say it, yes, even if Springer and others choose to renege, universal almost-OA will be incomparably preferable to the status quo -- and it won't have the deterrent of costing an extra $3000 per article, while subscriptions are still paying all the publishing costs.) And universal almost-OA, through universal immediate-deposit mandates, will very soon bring on 100% OA. JV: "So my advice to authors who want secure, sustainable, future-proof, easy OA, is to publish with OA, in a journal that gives that opportunity, be it a new OA journal that only accepts OA articles, or an established and trusted 'hybrid' journal, that offers the OA choice."And my advice to authors is to self-archive in their institutional repositories no matter what else they do -- and to pay for Gold OA only if and when they can afford it, and feel it's worth the extra price. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, April 17. 2007Don't Make Deposit Timing Policy Conditional On Publisher Embargo Policies
On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Alexander Borbély, University of Zurich, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
I was astonished to read that depositing the final version of the manuscript is prohibited [for Blackwell's European Journal of Neuroscience]... Making available only the version originally submitted is not very useful if major modifications based on the referees' recommendation are made:I am very familiar with these instructions. Blackwell's is a 12-month embargo publisher.Are you familiar with these instructions and what is your opinion?Blackwell Publishing PDF version of the Article The solution is extremely simple: always deposit the postprint (i.e., the refereed, revised, accepted final draft) immediately upon acceptance for publication (definitely not 12 months later!) and set the access as "Closed Access" instead of "Open Access," if you wish, which means the metadata (author, title, journal, abstract) are openly accessible to anyone on the web immediately, but the full-text is not. In addition, as I wrote before, make sure to implement the "Fair Use" Button (in your university's repository, ZORA): EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST. ![]() ![]() Several other points: (1) Unlike Blackwell's journals, most journals (62%) already endorse immediate OA deposit. (2) There is no reason whatsoever to hold out for the publisher's PDF: The author's postprint is just fine for all research purposes! The PDF is completely irrelevant, one way or the other. (3) Although it must always be left as an individual judgment for the author to make in the case of each individual paper, it is also good scholarly practice, wherever possible, to also deposit, even earlier, the pre-refereeing preprint (especially if submitting to an embargo publisher): The repository will tag the preprint clearly as an unrefereed draft, with a prominent link to the refereed postprint (and from there to the "Fair Use" button); this will also allow search engines to pick up the full-text for full-text indexing in the case of a Closed Access deposit, leading to many more discoveries of both the preprint and the postprint. I do not for one microsecond believe that any publisher's statement that "a corrected version of the preprint (i.e., the postprint) cannot be made OA immediately" has any legal validity; nor do I think such nonsense could ever be enforced, had it had any legal validity. But instead of wasting still more time to wait for people to at last realize this, and to set access to their immediately deposited postprints as OA immediately, the immediate-deposit/optional-access policy (plus the "Fair Use" button) are the best interim compromise solution. Then nature can take its course. And meanwhile researcher access needs are taken care of, almost-immediately, through almost-OA, during any putative embargo period. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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