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Saturday, April 14. 2007Depot: Central Round-Up, Back-Up and Stop-Gap for UK's Open Access Institutional Repositories![]() ![]() DEPOT is many things, but chiefly a mediator for UK Institutional Repositories (IRs): (a) If your institution already has an IR, Depot will redirect your deposit there, while also registering it and tracking it centrally, to make sure the deposit is picked up by the major search engines.I have mostly only congratulations for the designers and implementers of Depot. It is the optimal synthesis: It reinforces the author's own IR as the canonical locus for OA content. It monitors and integrates all of the UK's IRs. And it provides a provisional locus for any researcher whose institution does not yet have an IR (or for researchers who are not affiliated with an institution). I would, however, like to recommend three small but very important changes in the following: These are the corresponding three small but crucial changes I would strongly urge:(1) Currently, Depot states that only postprints can be deposited.(The postprint is either the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication, or the published PDF itself.)(2) Currently, Depot does not state when deposit should be done.(The depositor is referred to the Romeo directory of publisher policies on author self-archiving to ascertain whether and when he can deposit.) (1') Do not restrict deposit to postprints: Include preprints too.(Preprints are pre-peer-review versions of articles that are to be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.) (2') Make it clear that the deposit of the postprint should be done as soon as the article is accepted for publication.(The preprint should be deposited even earlier, to be followed by the postprint as soon as it exists.) And most important of all: (3') Make it clear that the deposit itself, and its timing, does not depend in any way on publisher policy: only the OA-access-setting date might.The postprints of any articles for which the publisher has not yet endorsed immediate self-archiving can still be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, but the deposit can be provisionally set as Closed Access, instead of Open Access, if the author wishes, with only the metadata accessible to all. Depot's FAQ is not quite clear on the relation between Depot and the many IRs. Presumably if the author's institution has an IR, Depot will redirect the deposit there. (In that case, excluding preprints is not a good idea, not only because they are crucial precursors of postprints, but because all IRs will welcome both preprints and postprints. It would be a very bad idea to try to draw a formal line between the two. Let peer review itself do that, and then the journal's name, both prominent metadata tags in EPrints as well as other IRs.) ![]() Any would-be user webwide, led by the metadata to a deposit that turns out to be in Closed Access, can just copy/paste his email address into a box that is provided by the software, and then press the REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT button. This immediately sends the author an automated email eprint request, containing a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automated emailing of one copy of his eprint to the requester. There is a vast difference between deferring deposit until the publisher endorses OA deposit, and doing an immediate CA deposit, deferring only the OA-setting. Depot should definitely facilitate the latter practice. (Some clarification is also needed of the mechanism of transfer from Depot to the author's IR.) But overall, the Depot service is near-perfect, and once optimised with these two small changes, it is worthy of not only admiration but emulation worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, April 7. 2007Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) adopts Green OA self-archiving mandate![]() "After the good news from Liège, Flanders now also has an OA mandate: the FWO (major Flemish research funding body) obliges its researchers to self-archive all articles coming from research funded by the FWO, in OA repositories. This needs to be done at the latest one year after the publication date, to increase visibility and impact. More information on the conditions can be found in their general agreement for researchers." ![]() (1) "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" ![]() (3) "EPrints 'Request eprint' button"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, March 14. 2007US and EU Both Have Petitions for OA Mandates
The US Alliance for Tax-Payer Access and other sponsors have just launched a US counterpart to the highly successful and still-growing EU Petition calling for Open Access to be mandated by research funders and institutions.
The EU Petition already has over 23,000 signatories, including over 1000 organisations (universities, research funders, academies of sciences, scholarly societies, research and development industries, publishers). If you are officially signing for an organisation, please don't just sign the petition! Do locally what you are petitioning for: Adopt an OA self-archiving mandate at your institution, as the Rector of the University of Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier has just done (see below) and register your mandate in ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies). Liege's is the latest of 9 institutional mandates, 3 departmental mandates, and 11 research funder mandates already adopted worldwide, plus 5 funder mandates and 1 multi-institution mandate proposed. Not only has Universite de Liege adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate, but it has adopted the ID/OA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) mandate recommended by EURAB and specifically designed to immunise the policy from all the permissions problems (imagined and real) and embargoes that have been delaying adoption of Green OA mandates or have led to the adoption of sub-optimal mandates (that allowed deposit to be delayed or not done at all, depending on publisher policy). Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)The key to the ID/OA mandate's success and power is that it separates the mandatory component (deposit of the final peer-reviewed draft immediately upon acceptance for publication -- no delays, no exceptions) from the access-setting component. (Immediate setting of access to the deposit as Open Access is strongly recommended, but not mandatory: provisionally setting access as Closed Access is an allowable option where judged necessary.) It is to be hoped now that the ULg policy will first spread to the other francophone universities of Belgium, then to the rest of Belgium, Europe, and worldwide. University OA self-archiving mandates are an essential complement to the researcher funder OA self-archiving mandates. University mandates cover unfunded as well as funded research, and provide the all-important locus for the deposit (whether mandated by the funder or the university): the researcher's own university's Institutional Repository.Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:35:15 -0400 Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, March 13. 2007Double-Paying for Optional Gold OA Instead of Mandating Green OA While Subscriptions Are Still Paying for Publication: Trojan Folly"I see the Howard Hughes Medical Institute HHMI-Elsevier deal [in which HHMI pays for for "gold" OA publishing of its funded research] as a major set back for institutional self-archiving as it muddies the green landscape, which I am sure is one of the underlying intents of Elsevier and other publishers in the STM group. I suspect more publishers may follow suit and reverse their stand on green if they think there is money to be made. Something needs to happen quickly. The Trojan Horse has proved to work, unfortunately. What should we do?"I know exactly what needs to be done, and it has been obvious all along: The mandates have to be taken completely out of the hands of publishers and out of the reach of embargoes, and there is a sure-fire way to do it: The mandates must be Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandates. Let the access to the deposit be provisionally set as Closed Access wherever there is the slightest doubt. That way publishers have no say whatsoever in whether or when the deposit itself is done. Then let the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button -- and human nature, and the optimality of OA -- take care of the rest of its own accord, as it will. If only we have the sense to rally behind ID/OA. Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)It is as simple as that. But we have to unite behind ID/OA, and give a clear consistent message (and for that we have to first clearly understand ID/OA!) If we keep flirting with embargoes and Gold and publishing reform and funding instead of univocally rallying behind the ID/OA mandate that will immunise us from publisher policies and further embargoes, we will get nowhere, and indeed we will lose ground. It is as simple as that. (P.S. HHMI got into this because of another legacy of folly, not originating with HHMI: The irrational insistence on central deposit in PubMed Central instead of local deposit in each researcher's own Institutional Repository. A Central Repository can -- on a far-fetched construal -- be argued to be a rival 3rd party re-publisher. Not so the author's own institution, archiving its own research.) Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, March 8. 2007Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat EmptorACS Press Release: "The American Chemical Society’s Publications Division now offers an important publishing option in support of the Society’s journal authors who wish or need to sponsor open access to their published research articles. The ACS AuthorChoice option, first launched in October 2006, provides a fee-based mechanism for individual authors or their research funding agencies to sponsor the open availability of their articles on the Web at the time of online publication. Under this policy, the ACS as copyright holder enables unrestricted Web access to a contributing author’s publication from the Society’s website, in exchange for a fixed payment from the sponsoring author. ACS AuthorChoice also enables such authors to post electronic copies of published articles on their own personal websites and institutional repositories for non-commercial scholarly purposes. I urge you to beware of the American Chemical Society's cynical, self-serving "AuthorChoice" Option. This is an "offer" to "allow" authors to pay, not just in order to provide Gold OA -- which is what hybrid Gold/Green publishers like Springer ("Open Choice") and Cambridge University Press ("Open Option") offer -- but in order to provide Green OA! (Virtually all other hybrid-Gold publishers are Green on author self-archiving, and do not presume to charge for it.) In other words, ACS is proposing to charge authors for the right to deposit their own papers in their own Institutional Repositories. This ploy was bound to be tried, but I urge you not to fall for it! You already have an unassailable right to deposit your peer-reviewed, accepted final drafts (postprints) of your ACS articles in your Institutional Repository. If you don't feel you can make them Open Access just yet, make them Closed Access for now, but deposit them, immediately upon acceptance for publication (the preprint even earlier). (The "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) " policy.) OA self-archiving mandates by research funders and universities, with time-limits on embargoes, are now being proposed and adopted to ensure that your deposits are not left in Closed Access for long. But on no account should you pay ACS a penny for the right to deposit. ![]() To pay for Gold OA today out of scarce research funds -- while all publication costs are still being fully paid for by subscriptions -- is already irrational. But to pay for Green OA would border on the absurd. Caveat Emptor! On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Adam Chesler (American Chemical Society) wrote (to the American Scientist Open Access Forum): "Recent posts to the listserv have contributed to a misunderstanding about the ACS AuthorChoice program to provide open article access... The ACS Author Choice option is for authors who wish or need to sponsor open access to their published research articles. It allows immediate open web access to the final published article as delivered from the ACS web site, in exchange for a fixed fee paid by the author or author's sponsor... ACS AuthorChoice also licenses authors to post electronic copies of published articles on their own personal websites... for scholarly purposes..."Does ACS endorse the posting of authors' peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional website for scholarly purpose without fee? In other words, is ACS now "Green" on author self-archiving, as the following American Learned Societies are? That is the only point at issue. The understanding is that ACS authors are instead asked to pay ACS to do this: Is this the case?American Anthropological Association (If I have indeed misunderstood, a profound and sincere apology is in order.) "ACS permits within the first 12 months of publication up to 50 complimentary article downloads to interested readers who are not already ACS subscribers; at 12 months and thereafter, reader access via these author-directed links is unlimited."My question is about the 51st to the Nth would-be user request during the first 12 months from the date of acceptance for publication, not just about the first 50. However, the draft in question need not be the official ACS PDF: just the author's final accepted version: Does ACS endorse the posting of authors' peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional websites for scholarly purposes without fee? Reply from Adam Chesler (American Chemical Society), on American Scientist Open Access Forum:I don't doubt that these free adverstisements serve ACS (and the first 50 would-be users) well during the 12-month embargo. ![]() Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, January 12. 2007Cliff Lynch on Open AccessAt the SPARC/ARL Forum on "Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research Policy Issues and Practical Strategies" (Oct 20 2006), Cliff Lynch presented "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points". Some of Cliff's six points are welcome and valid but a few are a bit more debatable: Lynch: "1. Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?Unfortunately, it does not suffice to say that Open Access (OA) is just "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature." OA is a very specific special case of the "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature," and it does not help to dissolve that specific case into the vaguer general category of "reducing barriers": OA is free online access to peer-reviewed research journal articles. Neither (i) the specific problem that OA is specifically meant to solve -- that of making research accessible to all its would-be users online -- nor (ii) the specific means of solving that specific problem is brought into focus by blurring the objective into generalities about "reducing barriers." The means of solving the specific problem of OA is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate OA self-archiving ("Green OA") of peer-reviewed research journal articles: And although there is a link between (1) research accessibility and (2) journal affordability, that link is indirect, and subtle, in the online age. It would be incorrect and simplistic to imagine that the research accessibility problem and the journal affordability problem (or their respective solutions) are one and the same. They are not."Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: Lynch: "There's been a lot of discussion about the desirability and potential implications of federal government mandates about deposit and access to the reports of findings of federally funded research. We should not forget that, even in disciplines where federal agencies are generous funders, a substantial part of the literature reports on the results of research that isn't federally funded."That is why the discussion is about both funder mandates and institutional mandates: That covers all research output, funded and unfunded. (See Lynch's own Point 2.) Lynch: "In my view, when we think about the fundamental integrity of the scholarly record available for open access via the Internet, we would be much better served if we can make the shift to open access at the level of entire journals or entire publisher journal portfolios rather than article by article."100% OA would be welcome in any way it could be provided, whether Green OA, by self-archiving 100% of journal articles, or "Gold OA", by converting 100% of journals to OA publishing, and then publishing therein. But most publishers are not converting to OA Gold publishing; and funders and institutions cannot mandate that they convert. Moreover (as Cliff points out in two of his other, valid points below) there is the sticky question of the per-article asking price for OA Gold publishing, which is rather arbitrary at this time. Gold OA is not worth purchasing at any price -- in view of the fact that Green OA is available as an alternative, and can be mandated, and can drive the price of Gold OA down to the true cost of the essentials. Hence there is no earthly reason to wait and hope for a direct transition to 100% OA via Gold OA, journal by journal. What needs to be OA is the articles, and those can and should and will be made 100% OA via institution/funder self-archiving mandates of exactly the kind that are increasingly being implemented and proposed today. If there is to be Gold OA at all, then the road to Gold OA is via Green OA. But once we have mandated 100% Green OA, we already have 100% OA, so whether or not there is eventually a transition to Gold OA becomes supererogatory. Rather than speculating about this now, we should get on with doing the do-able task of mandating and providing Green OA. Lynch: "We know from past experience that it's very difficult for many users of the scholarly record to understand what they are navigating and exploiting when there's only partial coverage. "The remedy for that "partial coverage" is not to keep waiting for (and/or to pay the pre-emptive asking price of) journal-by-journal Gold OA, but to mandate Green OA right now, so we can reach 100% OA at long last. Lynch: "Of course, if we can't persuade the journals and the publishers to support the move to open access, we'll have to go to less optimal approaches like author self-archiving and mandates by specific research funding agencies (both government and private)."How much longer does Cliff propose that we keep waiting, trying to persuade journals and publishers to move? (We have already been waiting well over a decade now.) And what determines whether the asking price is the right one (or the "more optimal" approach to 100% OA)? Lynch: "it may well be that the threat of legislation mandating deposit of research results may be doing more good, in terms of advancing progress and focusing discussion on the issues with a certain sense of urgency, than actual legislation would. And while I'm not opposed to legislative intervention here, I'd hope that any legislation that is enacted is transparent and invisible to authors who publish with journals that appropriately support open access."It is gratifying to hear that Cliff is not opposed to the OA mandates that have already been enacted and the others that are being planned, but the foregoing passage does sound a bit confusing, or confused: The mandates are to self-archive published articles (Green) not to publish in OA journals (Gold). The goal is to generate OA (Green), not to pressure publishers into converting to Gold. If what Cliff means is that mandates should not constrain publishers' choice of journals, that makes sense; but journals need not even be mentioned in mandates: Only the requirement to deposit the final peer reviewed draft, as soon as it is accepted for publication, has to be mentioned. And if the mandates allow an embargo period at all (most OA advocates don't think they should, or need to, but if some funders are nevertheless bent upon allowing delays, as some appear to be), let the allowable embargo be minimal (6 months at most); and during the embargo period, while the deposit is in Closed Access rather than Open Access, all ongoing research access needs webwide can be fulfilled via each Institutional Repository's semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button, which can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA on an individual request basis. Such a an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate also moots any journal copyright policy issues that might have constrained the journal-choice of the author in complying with the mandate. Lynch: "2. Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers"Here Cliff is perhaps advocating mandated rights retention, which would not be a bad idea if such a mandate could be successfully adopted over author objections that it too could constrain their choice of journal! And successful rights negotiation is not really necessary as a precondition for mandated self-archiving. Immediate deposit can be mandated without any reference to journal policy; 70% of journals already endorse immediate setting of access to Open Access. For the remaining 30%, access can be provisionally set to Closed Access and the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button can tide over usage needs during any embargo period. (Embargos will soon collapse under OA usage pressure in any case, as self-archiving grows.) So the best thing universities can do for OA is not merely to throw their weight behind rights retention by their authors, but to mandate immediate deposit of all final drafts accepted for publication ("postprints"), thereby complementing the funder mandates. Lynch: "My worst nightmare is that rights to the scholarly literature become so fragmented"Practices should not be dictated by nightmares but by clear reasoning, in the light of day: Once the full-texts of all articles are self-archived and freely accessible online, all the uses Cliff envisages (automatic harvesting, data-mining, etc.) come with the (free, online) territory, inexorably. No need to keep them all in the same (Gold) journal or "portfolio" for that, nor to renegotiate rights. Just deposit all articles in OA Institutional Repositories, free for all. And the PostGutenberg "glue" to keep a corpus from getting fragmented is metadata tags, not a shared spatial locus (nor the glue in the binding of a single shared journal locus). Lynch: "Again, this connects to the theme of the overall integrity of the scholarly record, and our need to be able to manage this record at scale."The scholarly record will now be distributed across a worldwide network of interoperable Institutional Repositories. Articles and data will be the principal items of interest; and the journal they were peer-reviewed and accepted by will simply be certified by one of their metadata tags (but a critically important tag). Lynch: "3. We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies"Here Cliff rightly calls into question whether the other "good works" of Scholarly Societies should continue to be subsidised by authors' lost research impact. The answer, of course, is No; and that will become clear to all once it is discussed openly. But, again, what is at issue is not cajoling or coercing publishers -- whether Scholarly-Society, commercial or otherwise -- to convert to Gold. (It would be helpful if they endorsed immediate Green, but even that is only desirable, but not necessary in advance.) The issue is research institutions and funders mandating Green OA. Scholarly Societies simply risk baring their blatant conflict of interest with their own membership (researchers) if they venture to oppose mandating Green OA. Lynch: "their journals typically are viewed as offering high quality at reasonable cost, and there's no reason that they shouldn't continue to be highly competitive if one moves away from a reader-pays model."No special need to talk to Scholarly Societies if one is not proposing to "move away" from any model but merely mandating self-archiving (with or without publisher endorsement). (And, to repeat, OA is not solely, or primarily about OA Gold: it is about OA. No need to "move way from models": just to move fingers to keyboard so as to deposit articles...) Lynch: "4. We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing"This recommendation too, is far too focussed on OA Gold and its speculative economics, rather than just plain old vanilla OA. What "we" need to do right now is to forget about affordability and to mandate OA self-archiving. And to move our fingers to the keyboard, to get going on the depositing... Lynch: "One takes the operating budget or historic revenue stream of a given journal and divides by the number of articles published or submitted, and announces the per-published-article cost (or submitted-article-cost, if one uses that model) for an open access journal."It is certainly true that this is an extremely arbitrary way of setting the asking price for OA Gold publishing. The only essential component of that current price is the cost of implementing peer review, which is somewhere between $50 and $500 per article. But there is no earthly reason we should still be fussing about that now at all. It's already late in the day. Time to forget about Gold Fever and get the fingers moving, to provide immediate OA... Lynch: "Perhaps the system needs to be redesigned to deliver a price point per article that we can afford. Suppose we redesigned journal publishing with the goal of $100 per article published?"Pick your price, but this is all just notional designing of notional solutions in the skyways of speculation: Pre-emptive OA Gold. The actual solution requires no guesstimating or publishing reform, voluntary or coerced, nor this interminable waiting and speculation: It just requires that researchers' institutions and funders mandate OA self-archiving, now. (And who are "We"? We are the research community: We can mandate self-archiving by and for ourselves. We can move our fingers to provide the OA. But we can't redesign journal publishing. And we don't need to. That's not what OA is about. OA is about providing OA. Gold is just one possible way to provide OA, and it's proving to be an extremely slow and uncertain way, spending far more time contemplating hypothetical economics than providing actual OA. And it can't be mandated. Green, in contrast, can and does provide immediate OA, is already beginning to be mandated, and is only waiting for the mandating to propagate to all research institutions and funders in order to provide at last the 100% OA we have been wait for for so long. And the mandates are on the way. Because they come from Us, the research community, the providers and users of the articles that we are seeking to make OA. No need to "redesign" anything but our digital kinematics -- and I don't mean financial or even cybernetic digits, but the dactyls at the beck and call of every one of us...) But Cliff is back again, at the financial digits: Lynch: "Or, if articles really must cost several thousand dollars each, and we are unwilling to deal with the implications or results of massively reducing costs, we need to explore what can we do to reduce the number of articles going into this costly system."By now, we have long forgotten the immediate, pressing, solvable problem, which is OA, and we have launched back into the usual round of passive armchair speculations about the journal affordability problem and publishing reform... Lynch: "similar questions can and should be asked about monograph publishing"Yes, but let those similar questions and answers be kept separate from the problem at hand, which is OA, i.e., in the first instance, Open Access to the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer reviewed journals, every single one of which is and always has been an author give-away, written solely for the sake of usage and impact, not for the sake of earning royalty revenue. Not necessarily true of all monographs (though it might be true of some). First things first. Let's require and reach 100% OA for OA's primary target, journal articles, and then contemplate the generalizability of our fabulous success to other forms of literature. In the meantime, no one is stopping monograph authors (or their fingers) from making their books OA too, if they so wish, and if their publishers can afford to publish them anyway. But let us not contemplate mandating that sort of thing just yet! Lynch: "5. Open Access Is Not a Threat to Peer Review: In Fact, It Has Nothing to Do with Peer Review -- but It Is Also Time to Talk about Peer Review"Yes, it is not a threat. Yes, it has nothing to do with it. And no, OA is not the context to talk about peer review. (If this is the time, then it should be talked about separately, elsewhere; nothing to do with OA.) Lynch: "The economic model underlying a journal has nothing to do with its peer review policy -- or its quality. There are many online journals that practice rigorous peer review. Indeed, going beyond just peer review, there seems to be no correlation between journal cost and quality."These truisms are worth repeating, since so many still fail to grasp them. But Cliff raises them misleadingly: OA is not the same thing as Gold OA. The peer-review issue is not just raised as a question about the quality standards of Gold OA journals. It is also raised by some publishers who keep proclaiming willy-nilly the doomsday scenario that mandating Green OA self-archiving will destroy journals and peer review. That is the empty alarmism that needs to be exposed for what it really is: Don't mention it! (In this context.)Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. It is indeed irrelevant to OA and only adds confusion to confusion, and delay and indecision to what has already been near-paralysis for far too long... Lynch: "We need to understand the extent of these costs and their implications."The costs of peer review alone can be vaguely estimated now, and have been. But the only way to determine the true costs of peer review alone (once all other obsolescent publishing functions have been jettisoned [like print] or offloaded [like online access-provision and archiving] onto the distributed network of OA IRs) is to mandate Green and then let nature take its course in the online era. (Don't ask me why nature couldn't take its course without the help of mandates, when 34,000 researchers happily perform the requisite keystrokes to sign a threat to boycott their journals if they do not provide OA, but it never occurs to them to go ahead and do the keystrokes to provide the OA for themselves! Or when university provosts perform the keystrokes in droves to sign in support of a federal federal proposal to mandate the keystrokes of self-archiving, but it never occurs to them to adopt a keystroke mandate at their own local institutions already, instead of sitting on their hands waiting for the federal mandate! I don't know the answer. It's a paradox, a koan, and I've dubbed it Zeno's Paralysis. But the affliction is curable, by mandates, freely applied to the research community's body politick.) By all means, let those who wish to reform the scholarly publishing system so as to better serve the academy so declare their intentions and proceed full-speed with their worthy agenda.Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.Lynch: "6. Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity." But let those who merely wish to maximise online access to a very specific subset of scholarly publications (peer-reviewed research articles), right now, proceed toward their specific, distinct, immediately reachable and already woefully overdue goal (OA) without being hamstrung by any other admirable but irrelevant agendas. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, December 25. 2006On SPARC's Advice to the Australian Research CouncilAcross the years, SPARC has often been a great help to the Open Access movement. But SPARC could help so much more if it could take advice, in addition to giving it (sometimes with insufficient information and reflection): - A Role for SPARC in Freeing the Refereed Literature (Jun 2000) ![]() (SPARC's advice in boldface, followed in each case by my comment, indented, followed by Australian OA specialist Arthur Sale [AS] commenting on my comment, in italics, double-indented)SPARC: "Research funders should include in all grants and contracts a provision reserving for the government relevant non-exclusive rights (as described below) to research papers and data." Fine, but this is not a prerequisite for self-archiving, nor for mandating self-archiving. It is enough if ARC clearly mandates deposit; the rest will take care of itself.SPARC: "All peer-reviewed research papers and associated data stemming from public funding should be required to be maintained in stable digital repositories that permit free, timely public access, interoperability with other resources on the Internet, and long-term preservation. Exemptions should be strictly limited and justified."AS: "A sensible fundee will take this action; how sensible they are will remain to be seen. The unsensible ones will have some explaining to do. ARC could have given advice like this, but didn't." That, presumably, is what the ARC self-archiving mandate amounts to.SPARC: "Users should be permitted to read, print, search, link to, or crawl these research outputs. In addition, policies that make possible the download and manipulation of text and data by software tools should be considered."AS: "Exactly. And every university in Australia will have access to such a repository by end 2007. 50% already do." All unnecessary; all comes with the territory, if self-archiving is mandated. (The policy does not need extra complications: a clear self-archiving mandate simply needs adoption and implementation.)SPARC: "Deposit of their works in qualified digital archives should be required of all funded investigators, extramural and intramural alike."AS: "Totally agree..." Yes, the self-archiving mandate should apply to all funded research.SPARC: "While this responsibility might be delegated to a journal or other agent, to assure accountability the responsibility should ultimately be that of the funds recipient."AS: "It does." Not clear what this refers to, but, yes, it is the fundee who should be mandated to self-archive.SPARC: "Public access to research outputs should be provided as early as possible after peer review and acceptance for publication. For research papers, this should be not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This embargo period represents a reasonable, adequate, and fair compromise between the public interest and the needs of journals."AS: "Yes the onus is on the fundee(s), and especially the principal investigator who has to submit the Final Report." SPARC: "We also recommend that, as a means of further accelerating innovation, a portion of each grant be earmarked to cover the cost of publishing papers in peer-reviewed open-access journals, if authors so choose. This would provide potential readers with immediate access to results, rather than after an embargo period." The ID/OA mandate -- together with the EMAIL EPRINT button -- already cover all immediate-access needs without needlessly diverting any research money at this time. The time to pay for publication will be if and when self-archiving causes subscriptions to collapse, and if that time ever comes, it will be the saved institutional subscription funds themselves that will pay for the publication costs, with no need to divert already-scarce funds from research. Instead to divert money from research now would be needlessly to double-pay for OA; OA can already be provided by author self-archiving without any further cost.Stevan HarnadAS: "This recommendation will certainly be disregarded, correctly in my opinion. ARC has never funded publication costs and does not intend to start now. Australian universities are already funded for publication and subscription costs through the normal block grants and research infrastructure funding. All they have to do is redirect some of their funding as they see fit. The recommendation might accelerate innovation, but it is not the ARC's job to fund innovation in the publishing industry." American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, December 14. 2006Well-Meaning Supporters of "OA + X" Inadvertently Opposing OAChris Armbruster seems to be a well-meaning supporter of OA + X (i.e., Open Access plus something else, "X," where in this case X seems to be: copyright reform, publishing innovation, and data-archiving). The problem with well-meaning supporters of OA + X invariably arises when X gets in the way of OA. For then, support for OA + X becomes opposition to OA - X (especially when "X" turns out to be a bigger, more complicated, slower, vaguer or less certain agenda than OA itself). But OA -- already long overdue, and now at last moving toward success via OA self-archiving mandates -- is not helped, at this point, by opponents of OA - X. I reply to Chris Armbruster below, suggesting that with a little patience, he may find that the likelihood of the "X" he desires (copyright reform, publishing innovation and data-archiving) will be greatly enhanced by OA itself, and OA itself, 100% OA, is now within practical reach, via self-archiving and self-archiving mandates. It is unhelpful in the extreme to urge not grasping 100% OA at this point, and holding out instead for "X." Failing to grasp the OA that is within reach already has a long history, alas (over a decade now), and the fallacy has a name -- "Zeno's Paralysis" -- and a long list of instances, which well-meaning supporters of OA + X would do well to consult, so as not to help history to repeat itself, inadvertently. A point-by-point reply to Chris Armbruster (CA) follows: CA:OA (to research articles, as defined) first has to be reached, before it can help foster data-archiving and innovation. OA is now within reach, via self-archiving, mandated by research institutions and funders, now spreading worldwide. Let us speak about using OA to foster data-archiving and innovation once we have OA, rather than continuing to hold OA at arm's length any longer, for any reason. (Research, and OA to research, by the way, are global, interdigitating matters, not European ones; all research benefits, reciprocally, from OA, not just European research.) CA: "The programme of the European Commission Conference: Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area - Brussels, 15-16 February 2007 includes speakers from the publishing industry such as Reed Elsevier and Springer, but it is clear that the proponents of Open Access are having their day in Brussels (on top of this - from Springer it is Jan Velterop). This vindicates those that read the outcome of the earlier study as an unequivocal support of OA, at least among the authors of the study and - presumably - among those in DG Research that commissioned the study."Let us hope it is so. Now why is an OA supporter, like Chris Armbruster, not happy about this? CA: "Yet, it is far from certain that the conference will become a milestone on the way to OA. For the OA movement may be heading into a dead end. It is worrying to see the widespread incapacity to understand the importance of unblocking innovative capacities in scientific publishing, scholarly communication and access to data."The immediate objective is OA, and 100% OA will contribute immeasurably to "unblocking innovative capacities in scientific publishing, scholarly communication and access to data." Blocking or delaying immediate OA will not. CA: "And here is the problem with the prior study of scientific publishing in Europe, with the so-called green road to access and with the new approach of Science Commons. The study by Dewatripont et al failed to address the issue of copyright and thus missed the importance of shifting the dissemination of research articles AND data from an IPR to nonexclusive licensing."The objective of the OA movement is OA. Copyright is addressed to the extent that it is pertinent to OA. Nonexclusive licensing of articles AND data is welcome and desirable, but it is not a precondition for OA, and insisting on it as a prerequisite for OA simply places further needless obstacles in the path of OA. Self-archiving mandates require researchers to deposit their articles in their Institutional (or Central) Repositories. For the articles that are published in the 69% of journals that have already endorsed immediate OA self-archiving, access to the deposited article can be set to Open Access immediately upon acceptance for publication. For the remaining 31%, access can be provisionally set to Closed Access during any allowed embargo interval, during which all research usage needs can be fulfilled via the semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT button, whereby individual users, seeing the deposited article's globally accessible metadata, click to request an individual copy from the author via email, and the author can authorise the emailing via one click. That's not yet OA, but a close functional approximation, and will be followed by OA quite naturally once mandated depositing approaches 100% globally. Hence, no need to await successful negotiation of nonexclusive licensing in order to self-archive, or mandate self-archiving, right now.Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? CA: "Many proponents of green OA seem to brazenly assume that they can go on self-archiving post-prints without paying attention to copyright"Please see above. CA: "At some point in the future (when OA pressure has abated somewhat)"Why would it be imagined that OA pressure will abate rather than grow, as OA grows? Enjoying the benefits of OA will only increase the desire for and dependence upon OA by research and researchers, as well as their institutions and funders (the ones who mandate it), worldwide. CA: "publishers will ask their authors to remove all openly accessible copies of the research article, word-wide, from all servers."This is being hypothesised here rather confidently a-priori on the basis of a subjective impression. The objective probabilities are look rather the opposite. CA: "Publishers are not to be blamed - for as long as their business model of regarding research articles and data as 'property' is accepted by researchers, universities and research funders. Shareholders have every right to insist that publishers maximise profits from the property that they have acquired."On present evidence, publishers are to be praised, not blamed, for 93% of journals have already endorsed some form of self-archiving. There is also zero evidence to date that self-archiving causes cancellations. And even if it ever does, publishing can and will adapt. It is quite clear that maximising research usage and impact -- for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders, and for the tax-paying public that funds the funders and institutions, and for whose benefit the research is conducted -- takes precedence over insuring publishers' current revenues streams and current cost-recovery methods. Publishing can and will adapt; it will not be able to deny research the benefits of OA. CA: "That Science Commons should now also be advocating self-archiving is unbelievable."On the contrary, it is quite sensible and welcome that Science Commons should recognise that access is the end and CC-licensing is merely one of the means: No, Chris, it moots it, once one realizes that all the usage capabilities that researchers need already come with the (free, online) territory once the full-text is made freely accessible to all online:"On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned"CA: "It is no comfort that SC provides "author addenda" for copyright transfer contracts by which the author retains the right to self-archive. This is nonsense because it effectively legitimates the mistaken idea that the future of scientific publishing and data management should continue to be one in which the publishing house will own the IPR to the article." Does this mean that not self-archiving research, free for all online, is in the best interest of researchers and universities? (OA - X is bad? It should be deferred until/unless we can have OA + X?)All the usage rights that researchers and research harvesters need for full-text journal-article content come with the free online territory (including linking, downloading, viewing, storing locally, printing-off locally, and data-crunching).CA: "The green road to OA and the Science Commons "author addenda" are not in the best interest of researchers and universities." CA: "They are certainly detrimental to the interest of higher education institutions and their students."It is bad for students to have free online access to the research output of higher education institutions? CA: "And they are ruinous to the economic future of Europe."Protecting the current revenue streams and cost-recovery models of journal publishers is more important for the economic future of Europe than maximising the usage, uptake, applications and impact of European research output (i.e., maximising research progress and productivity)? CA: "Here is why: Given the expansion of research, the rise of the internet, the acceleration of innovation and the increasing importance of knowledge-based industry and services it is imperative that access to scientific knowledge (in the form of research articles and data that have been publicly funded and/or have been produced not-for-profit) be unrestricted and seamless."Is that not precisely what OA provides? And is that not precisely why self-archiving is to be mandated? CA: "This would not only increase the quality of research (ease of peer review, availability of results, transparency of knowledge claims), it would also unblock the market for the creative emergence of new services to readers and authors."Note that all these benefits, on which there is full agreement with Chris, are benefits of OA, not of X. Yet it is against OA that Chris argues when he argues against OA - X. CA: "Given the large number of knowledge claims, the enormous amount of publications in circulation and the requirement to handle ever more complex data, we urgently need services that help readers (be they researchers, students or companies) organize their activities more effectively and efficiently."What we need most urgently is the 80-85% of annual research output that is not yet OA to be made OA. Self-archiving mandates will generate this. Yes, search and navigation services on this growing OA database can and will become ever more powerful as the OA database grows. But what is missing now is not the overlay services, but the OA content itself. CA: "The challenge to the European Commission is not to take sides for or against OA."Isn't it? If immediate OA is reachable via mandated self-archiving, and its benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public are substantial, should the European Commission not take sides in the conflict of interest between those benefits and the risks to the current revenue streams and cost-recovery models of research publishers, in deciding whether or not to mandate OA self-archiving? This "X" sounds rather abstract, vague, and general. Mandating OA self-archiving in order to maximise European research access and impact, in contrast, is concrete, specific, practical, testable, tested, has been demonstrated to be both implementable and successful, and has already been sporadically implemented in the UK, Switzerland, Portugal, Australia, and India, with proposals pending in the US and Europe. It is time to implement it systematically in Europe, for the sake of OA.Houghton, J., Steele, C. & Sheehan, P. (2006) Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits. Research Communication Costa in Australia: Emerging Opportinities and Benefits. A report to the Department of Education, Science and Training.CA: "It is to understand what legal, economic and technical regime would be best for the quality of research in the ERA, for the quality of higher education in the EHEA and for the economic prosperity of Europe as a whole." Let us hope that the Brussels meeting will not instead be distracted by "X." Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, December 12. 2006Raincoat Science
These cartoons by Judith Economos don't really capture the "raincoat" metaphor. (What they are actually illustrating is "The Geeks and the Irrational.")
The raincoat metaphor (to ruin it, by explaining it) speaks for itself: Rain is obvious. The (cumulative) disadvantages of wetness are obvious. That raincoats are for shielding you from the rain is obvious. That raincoats can shield you from the rain is obvious. Yet, Zeno-like, the raincoat-advice -- "It's raining: Time to put on the ol' raincoats!" -- is not taken, for at least 34 silly, obviously defeasible reasons: "It's not raining. You can't stop the rain. Rain's good for you. God meant us to get wet. Raincoats are illegal. Raincoats don't work. Raincoats don't last. Raincoats will ruin the health-care industry. We need to block the clouds directly instead. Putting on a raincoat takes too long. Putting on a raincoat is too much work. I can't button my raincoat..." (See "Raincoat Science: 43 More Open Access Haikus") But Judith's cartoons are just too good not to show, even though they are about the green vs gold option rather than the don (sic) vs. don't option... (Judith Economos also illustrated these Open Access rhymes. Feel free to use any of this to promote OA.) ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Monday, November 20. 2006Two Happy Accidents Demonstrate Power of "Eprint Request" Button![]() Two recent "accidents," occurring independently at two different institutions, provide dramatic evidence of the potential power of this feature: The button is intended to tide over researcher usage needs during any embargo interval. As such, it is expected to apply only to a minority of deposits (as the majority of journals already endorse immediate Open Access-setting. The two accident-anecdotes come from University of Southampton and Université du Québec à Montréal: Southampton has many IRs: A departmental IR (Department of Electronics and Computer Science) already has an immediate full-text deposit mandate, but the university-wide IR does not yet have a mandate, so it has many deposits for which only the metadata are accessible, many of them deposited via library mediation rather than by the authors themselves. This will soon change to direct author deposit, but meanwhile, "The Button" was implemented, and the result was such a huge flood of eprint requests that the proxy depositors were overwhelmed and the feature quickly had to be turned off! The Button will of course be restored -- using LDAP to redirect the eprint requests to the authors rather than the library mediators -- but the accident was instructive in revealing the nuclear power of the button! Authors, we expect, will be gratified by the countable measures of interest in their work, and we will make a countable metric out of the number of eprint requests. Authors will be able to opt out of receiving eprint requests -- but we confidently expect that few will choose to do so! (Our confidence is based on many factors, take your pick: (1) Authors' known habit of looking first at the bibliography of any article or book in their field, to see "Do they cite me?" (2) Authors' known habit of googling themselves as well as looking up their own citation-counts in Web of Science and now in Google Scholar. (3) Employers' and funders' growing use of research performance metrics to supplement publication counts in employment, promotion and funding decisions...) Much the same thing happened at UQaM but this time it was while a new IR was still under construction, and its designers were still just testing out its features with dummy demo papers (some of them real!). "The Button" again unleashed an immediate torrent of eprint requests for the bona fide papers, so the feature had to be (tremulously, but temporarily) disabled! Caveat Emptor! Increasing Institutional Repository Content with "email eprint" ButtonStevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum ![]() ![]()
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