Open Access Archivangelism

The HEFCE/REF exception is not to the deposit requirement but to the OA requirement, and that makes all the difference in the world.

No publisher can block deposit; all they can do is embargo the date on which access to the deposit is set as Open Access (OA).

All REF submissions must be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication -- embargo or no embargo. The length of the allowable OA embargo, and exemptions from it, are an entirely separate matter.

Immediate-deposit allows a uniform mandate to be adopted by all institutions and funders, regardless of publisher OA embargo policy.

Once deposited, even if embargoed, access to an individual copy for research purposes can nevertheless be requested and provided on a one-to-one basis by one click each from the requestor to request and one click from the author to comply, thanks to the institutional repositories' copy-request Button.

But only if -- and when -- the papers are deposited.

Sale, Arthur; Couture, Marc; Rodrigues, Eloy; Carr, Les and Harnad, Stevan (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.). University of Toronto Press.

Comments on "What would be the implications of a ‘gold’ Open Access REF policy?" (Ben Johnson, HEFCE)

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Ben Johnson “this post ignores … the commonly heard prediction that universal green OA will somehow deliver a sustainable gold OA future all on its own…

Let me spell out that commonly heard prediction, explaining exactly how and why today's pre-green gold OA is fool’s gold -- unaffordable and unsustainable -- and exactly how and why universal green OA, on its own, will deliver a sustainable gold OA future, in the form of post-green fair-gold:

0. Lost Impact: Journal subscriptions are costly, unaffordable and growing, research funds are scarce, hard to come by and shrinking, and research access, usage, impact, productivity and progress are being needlessly lost every day that we fail to provide OA.

1. Over-Pricing: Pre-green gold OA publication fees are arbitrarily and hugely over-priced. (We will see how much, and why, shortly.)

2. Double-Payment: Payment for pre-green gold is double payment: (i) subscription fees for incoming papers plus (ii) gold fees for outgoing papers. (Must-have subscription journals cannot be cancelled by an institution until those same articles are accessible to users in some other way.)

3. Double_Dipping: On top of that, paying the same "hybrid gold" journal (both subscription and optional gold) for pre-green hybrid gold also allows publisher double-dipping.

4. "Rebates": Even if the pre-green hybrid gold publisher promises all N of its subscribing institutions a full, 100% rebate on all hybrid gold income received, that only means that (N-1)/N of whatever hybrid gold any institution pays for its own outgoing hybrid gold papers becomes a subsidy to all the other N-1 subscribing institutions: The institution only gets back 1/Nth of its hybrid gold outlay. (The UK, for example, would get back a 6% subscription rebate for its hybrid gold outlay; the rest of the UK hybrid gold outlay would become a rebate to the other 94% of subscribing institutions in the countries that were not foolish enough to pay pre-emptively for pre-green gold.) Unless the full gold OA rebate goes to the same institution that paid for the gold (by deducting it from the subscription fee), it is still double-payment.

5. Repositories: Research funds are scarce, subscriptions are barely affordable, and pre-green gold payment is completely unnecessary, because green OA can be provided at no extra cost. (Institutional repositories already exist anyway, for multiple purposes, so their cost per paper is negligible, particularly compared to the grotesque cost per paper for pre-green gold.)

6. CC-BY: CC-BY is most definitely not so urgent today, compared to access itself, as to be worth the extra cost of pre-green gold today: CC-BY will come quite naturally of its own accord soon after universal green prevails, and at no extra cost. (We will see how and why shortly.)

7. Embargoes: Publisher embargoes on green are ineffectual because of the repositories’ copy-request Button -- if, but only if the paper was mandatorily deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, exactly as HEFCE requires). The sole purpose of publishers' OA embargoes today is to try to ensure that -- come what may -- their current level of revenue per paper published, whether via subscriptions or via fool's gold, is sustained. (Please pause for a moment to think this through. It says it all.)

8. Cancelation: So post-green — i.e., once immediate-deposit green has been mandated and provided universally, by all institutions and funders, as HEFCE has done -- institutions can at last cancel their journal subscriptions, because then their users can access the content another way.

9. Obsolete Costs: The post-green unsustainability of subscriptions will force publishers to cut all publishing costs that have been made obsolete by the post-green OA era: Publishers will be forced to phase out the print edition, the online edition, access-provision and archiving: these functions will now be offloaded onto the distributed global network of green OA institutional repositories. And publishers current level of revenue per article will not be sustained.

10. Fair Gold: To cover the remaining post-green cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing — which is just the cost of managing peer review itself — post-green journals will convert to affordable, sustainable fair gold. Institutions will easily pay this service fee, per outgoing paper, out of a fraction of their windfall subscription cancelation savings on incoming papers.

In other words, post-green, subscriptions will be gone, embargoes will be gone, and all OA will be CC-BY (where desired).

Ben Johnson: “Would repositories disappear in a gold OA world? No, they’re still useful for theses etc. Monitoring would continue to be necessary for any OA policy.”

In the Post-green fair-gold OA world there will no longer be any need to monitor OA policy. Everything published will be fair-gold OA! But there will certainly be a need for the worldwide network of green OA repositories — to provide access and archving in place of the pre-green subscription journals: For it will have been the cancelation pressure generated by universally mandated-and-provided green OA that drove the entire downsizing and transition to fair gold.

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

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

______ (2013) The Postgutenberg Open Access Journal (revised). In, Cope, B and Phillips, A (eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal (2nd edition). 2nd edition of book Chandos.

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

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

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

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Ben Johnson:
December 8, 2014 at 10:16 pm

Stevan, you make an excellent set of points. Particularly interesting to me is the notion that ‘offsetting’ schemes, even those that look quite generous on the face of it (like RSC, who offer APC vouchers equal to the full subscription rate of a given institution), are still set up to replace subscriptions with APCs at the 100% level.

While it isn’t a professional mission of mine to drive down the cost of scholarly communication at the expense of all else, clearly one of the most compelling advantages of your 100% green-leveraged transition idea is that it offers an opportunity to make the whole of scholarly publishing much cheaper than it is now. We should always be mindful that the price of OA publishing in ‘top’ journals can reach into the £000’s but the cost of posting in a repository is £33, and posting on the arXiv costs just $7 (as I read somewhere the other day). A case for the marginal benefit of spending those extra thousands of pounds on gold fees has, as far as I’m aware, not been made – even if that marginal benefit includes CC BY.

As I’ve argued before in this blog, I’m not convinced that journal publishing need do much more than referee articles and stamp them with their brand sticker. So, while the system probably won’t ever get down to being just $7 per article, there are strong public policy reasons why funders of research would not be averse to an outcome that managed to do away with a lot of the superfluities that surround that most highly affected of artefacts, the “version of record”. (I do think there is a good strategic argument for wanting CC BY, though, if perhaps there is no economic or financial case.)

Most interestingly for the neutral, the success criterion of such a green-leveraged transition is identical to the success criterion of a gold future: both require ~100% uptake, globally. So this makes for an interesting fight, doesn’t it?

The EC-commisioned Science-Metrix study has a lot of interesting and useful information that I hope the EC will apply and use.

Access Timing. The fundamental problem highlighted by the Science-Metrix findings is timing: Over 50% of all articles published 2007-2012 are freely available today. But the trouble is that their percentage in the most critical years, namely, the 1-2 years following publication, is far lower than that! This is partly because of publisher OA embargoes, partly because of author fears and sluggishness, but mostly because not enough strong, effective OA mandates have as yet been adopted by institutions and funders. I hope the Science-Metrix study will serve to motivate and accelerate the adoption of strong, effective OA mandates worldwide. That will narrow the gap at the all-important growth tip of research, which is its first 1-2 years.

A few things to bear in mind:

1. Delayed Access. Publishers have essentially resigned themselves to Delayed Access — i.e., free online access 1-2 years after publication. They know they can’t stop it, and they know it doesn’t have a significant effect on subscription revenues. Hence the real battle-ground for OA is the growth region of research: the 1-2 years following publication. That’s why OA mandates are so important.

2. Embargoes. Most OA mandates allow an OA embargo during the first year folllowing publication. But there are ways that immediate research needs can be fulfilled even during an OA embargo, namely, via institutional repositories’ semi-automatic copy-request Button. For this Button to fulfill its purposes, however, OA mandates must require deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication, not just after a 6-12-month OA embargo has elapsed. There are still too few such immediate-deposit mandates, but the Science-Metrix study would have missed the "almost-OA" access that they provide unless it also measured Button-based copy-provision.

3. Green OA, Gold OA and Non-OA. It is incorrect that "Green OA" means only repository-based OA. Of course OA (free online access) provided on authors' websites is Green OA too. The best way to define Green OA is OA provided by other than the publisher: Gold OA is provided by the publisher (though often paid for by the author or the author's institution or funder). Green OA is provided by the author, wherever the author provides the free online access. (And, although it is not the kind of OA advocated or mandated by institutions and funders, 3rd-party "bootleg" OA, apart from being hard to ascertain, is also Green OA: it certainly doesn't merit a color of its own -- and probably a lot of the back access is 3rd-party-provided rather than author-provided.) So the Science-Metrix data would be more informative and easier to interpret if it were all clearly classified as either Green OA, Gold OA, or non-OA. That would give a clearer idea of the relative size and growth rate of the two roads to OA.

4. The OA Impact Advantage. I am sure that Gold OA would show the same OA impact advantage as Green OA if it were equally possible to measure it. The trouble is determining the non-OA baseline for comparison. Green OA impact studies can do this easily, by comparing OA and non-OA articles published in the same journal issue and year; Gold OA impact studies have the problem of equating OA and non-OA journals for content and quality. And although there are junk journals among both non-OA and Gold OA journals, it is undeniable that their proportions are higher among Gold OA journals (see Beall's list) whereas the proportion of Gold OA journals themselves is still low. So their impact estimates would be dragged down by the junk-Gold journals.

5. From Fools Gold to Fair Gold. The Science-Metrix study is right that toll-access publishing will prove unsustainable in the long run. But it is mandatory Green OA self-archiving that will drive the transition to Fair-Gold OA sooner rather than later.

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

Vincent-Lamarre, P., Boivin, J., Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., & Harnad, S. (2014). Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score. arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.2926.

P.S. I learned from Richard van Noorden's posting on this that the Open Access Button -- which names and shames publishers for embargoing OA whenever a user encounters a non-OA paper -- can now also email an automatic request to the author for a copy (if it can find the author's email address). This new capability complements the already existing copy-request Button implemented in many institutional repositories (see EPprints and DSpace), which is reliably linked to the author's email address. The purpose of the repositories' copy-request Button is to complement and reinforce institutional and funder OA mandates that require authors to deposit their final, refereed drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication rather than only after a publisher OA embargo has elapsed.

In response to the HEFCE Open Access Policy for REF2020, the Publishers Association has made the following counter-proposal, which is as predictable as the succession of night upon day:

1. Don't require deposit upon the date of acceptance, because publisher embargoes are timed to begin on the date of publication, not the date of acceptance.

2. Don't require deposit of the author's final draft; wait for the publisher's version of record.

3. Don't require deposit at all: let us take care of it, after our embargo has elapsed: then you don't have to worry about figuring out the date of publication.

4. Please send us a justification for wanting to do otherwise.

Now I find these four points so outrageous and presumptuous -- and so transparently self-interested, running roughshod over the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public -- that they don't need to be answered at all (and of course they need not and should not be heeded in any way).

But past experience has shown that the research community (like Schultz's Charlie Brown and the annual football that Lucy always manages to pull out from under him every time) somehow always manages to fall for publisher FUD. The FUD is invariably formulated to appear as if the publishers are just trying to help, and make things simpler and easier for the research community. But what keeps being missed by the naive research community is that the complications and difficulties that the publishers' proposals to "help" with are invariably complications and difficulties that are being imposed by the publishers themselves, in the form of embargoes and restrictions!

In the present case it's all about ensuring the one thing that is important to publishers about open access and open-access mandates: that publishers' embargoes on Green OA are faithfully obeyed (unless, even better, the author pays for immediate Gold OA). Nothing to do with ensuring OA, and as soon as possible.

The short answers to these four pieces of publisher FUD are, accordingly:

1. No thank you. We want deposit to be done as soon as the paper is refereed and accepted, because (i) that is when the paper is ready to be used by researchers, (ii) many publishers do not embargo OA, and (iii) even if there is a publisher OA embargo and an author wishes to comply, the author can provide individual copies to individual users with the repository's request-copy-Button immediately upon deposit during the embargo -- as long as the final draft is deposited immediately upon acceptance.

2. No thank you. The acceptance date is clear and certain for all papers, and it is the earliest access point; the date of publication is later, sometimes much, much later, and its timing is variable and indeterminate (cover date often does not correspond to date the issue appears). And besides coming too late, the publisher's version of record has more (publisher) restrictions on it.

3. No thank you. We would rather retain control of providing Button-access, and then OA, to our own final drafts; and we can track the embargo for ourselves, thank you very much.

4. No thank you. Please send us your justification for asking research institutions and funders to justify to publishers when they require their researchers to deposit their final drafts: We are not talking about OA or embargoes here but about deposit.

That said, here is some tit-for-tat for the Publishers Association's letter to HEFCE:

PA: "Following the publication of HEFCE’s statement of policy in March 2014 The Publishers Association and its members have been consulting with other stakeholders as to how best we in the publishing community can assist researchers and institutions to comply with the policy, particularly with regards to the deposit requirements.

With regards (and all due respect), the deposit requirements have nothing to do with publishers (or with publisher embargoes on OA).

PA: "In the course of these conversations it has become clear that this aspect of the policy is a source of widespread concern. Therefore I am writing to ask if HEFCE would give serious consideration to reviewing and revising certain elements of it."

No doubt there is publisher concern about the deposit requirement: That concern is precisely because deposits (unlike OA embargoes) cannot be controlled by publishers.

PA: "For us, the problematic section is Section 18 which states that “the output must have been deposited as soon after the point of acceptance as possible and no later than three months after this date (as given in the acceptance letter or email from the publications to the author)”.
Section 19 then goes on to require that the output must have been deposited as the author’s accepted and final peer-reviewed text, which may later be updated by the version of record.

Never mind the version of record. It's another matter. We're talking here about the author's final draft, and the time it is to be deposited.

PA: "For the avoidance of doubt, The PA and members are of course in no way opposed to the principle of deposit per se; rather we are concerned with the timing and form of the mandatory deposit."

Well, it's good to know that the PA are in no way opposed to something that is none of their business, and over which they have no control. But then why mention it at all?

PA: "In paragraph 29 of the Consultation Document on the Policy (July 2013) HEFCE stated that:
“We also wish to make the process of compliance as simple as possible for authors and HEIs and have received advice that the point of acceptance would be more suitable.” The PA’s response to the Consultation (October 2013) spoke to this point by saying “it is unclear where this advice has come from and what the justification for it is. To ensure compliance with embargo periods, which commence from the date of publication, it is logical to coincide the deposit or linking of papers with the publication date.”"

Is the PA owed a justification for a deposit policy that is none of its business and out of its control?

And why are publisher embargoes even being mentioned in this context? Yes, publisher OA embargoes are timed from date of publication (which varies wildly from paper to paper). But the issue here is deposit -- not publisher OA embargoes or their timing.

There is no link (logical or otherwise) between the deposit date, publication date, and embargo end-date.

PA: "Our subsequent discussions have confirmed us in our view that it would be far preferable for HEIs, researchers and publishers that the timing of the deposit of papers be coincident with the date of the publication of the version of record. This is for two principal reasons:
It would allow for the clearer management of embargo periods. Since these begin at the point of publication, deposit in institutional repository at this point removes the potential for any confusion arising between the availability of the accepted author manuscript and the version of record. Repositories will need to know the date of publication in order to respect the embargo period but they cannot know this from the date of acceptance."

As stated, OA embargo periods are reckoned from the (variable) publication date, not from deposit date. They have nothing to do with deposit date.

And OA is OA whether it is OA to the author's final draft or OA to the publisher's version of record (which has extra usage restrictions).

The HEFCE/REF mandate is to deposit the final draft upon acceptance and to provide OA after the allowable embargo at the latest. No later version is stipulated.

And the only version that is available until publication (and can hence be made OA or can be provided via the Button during an OA embargo) is the author's version.

PA: "It would reduce the level of costs to HEIs, many of which have expressed concerns about the financial and administrative burden of ingesting author manuscripts in their repositories. We understand that for many institutions this will require a number of operations (for example, subsequent up-dating of data) to be performed manually which could be fulfilled automatically if deposit of the author manuscript is made upon publication. Not all HEIs have repositories capable of dealing with this requirement at present."

It is terribly good of publishers to worry about institutions' operating expenses! There is a very useful way in which publishers could help lower these expenses: charge less for journals, or drop OA embargoes.

But no help is needed with deposit, thank you very much. Authors are quite capable of depositing for themselves, as well as reckoning OA embargo intervals.

PA: "Some stakeholders have made proposals for mitigating what we would see as the adverse effects of the proposed policy: for example encouraging publishers to provide author manuscripts and metadata in a standardised format through the Jisc “Publishers Router”.
However, this would not address the central issue of the clear potential for confusion around the start date of the embargo period, which often will not be known at the point of acceptance. For many publishers, this proposed mitigation would imply an additional cost, which seems somewhat unreasonable to ask publishers to bear when we believe that deposit at the point of publication would eliminate these costs and concerns without compromising the policy’s goals to advance open access."

To repeat: determining the date of publication and the date of the end of the embargo has nothing whatsoever to do with date of deposit.

It is clear that from the publishers' point of view, the ideal outcome (if there is to be Green OA at all) is that it should be the publisher (who knows the date of publication, who owns the version of record, and who imposes the OA embargo) who controls the deposit, its timing, and the timing of the embargo.

No, thank you. This is not about depositing as late as possible, and providing OA as late as possible, but about exactly the reverse.

PA: "Ultimately we believe that any of these mitigating or alternative solutions are poor substitutes for amending the underlying policy requirement.
It would greatly help our understanding of the HEFCE stance if you were able to share with us the justification for the policy – as referred to in last year’s consultation – and your perspective on the costs."

Publishers have no right to ask institutions and funders for "justification" of deposit policies if the deposits are not OA.

But if you want a general idea: it is to provide Open Access -- or at least Button access -- to refereed research as soon as the refereed final draft is ready.

PA: "We would be grateful if you would give consideration to amending this aspect of open access policy. We believe it will act as a hindrance to the widespread take up of open access in the UK research community, whereas a requirement to deposit in an institutional repository on publication would be a policy which would command support from a much wider range of sector stakeholders."

Good of publishers to be so concerned about compliance with the HEFCE deposit mandate, but, no, ceding control to publishers over deposit timing is not the way to ensure compliance. Making compliance a prerequisite for REF eligibility is.

Happily, HEFCE was unfazed by this FUD. See how they have advised the Publishers Association (rather more diplomatically than I have put it above) that, no thanks, we will stay the course.

Stevan Harnad

For the record: I renounce (and have long renounced) the original 2002 BOAI (and BBB) definition of Open Access (OA) (even though I was one of the original co-drafters and co-signers of BOAI) in favour of its 2008 revision (sic) as Gratis OA (free online access) and Libre OA (free online access plus certain re-use rights, e.g., CC-BY).

The original BOAI definition was improvised. Over a decade of subsequent evidence, experience and reflection have now made it clear that the first approximation in 2002 was needlessly over-reaching and (insofar as Green OA self-archiving was concerned) incoherent (except if we were prepared to declare almost all Green OA — which was and still is by far the largest and most reachable body of OA — as not being OA!). The original BOAI/BBB definition has since also become an obstacle to the growth of (Green, Gratis) OA as well as a point of counterproductive schism and formalism in the OA movement that have not been to the benefit of OA (but to the benefit of the opponents of OA, as well as the publishers that want to ensure -- via Green OA embargoes -- that the only path to OA should be one that comes on their terms, i.e. preserves their current revenue streams: Fool's Gold OA).

I would like to agree with Richard Poynder that OA needs some sort of "authoritative" organization -- but of whom should that authoritative organization consist? My inclination is that it should be the providers and users of the OA research itself, namely peer-reviewed journal article authors, their institutions and their funders. Their “definition” of OA would certainly be authoritative.

Let me close by emphasizing that I too see Libre OA as desirable and inevitable. But my belief (and it has plenty of supporting evidence) is that the only way to get to Libre OA is for all institutions and funders to mandate (and provide) Gratis Green OA first — not to quibble or squabble or dawdle about the BOAI/BBB “definition” of OA, or their favorite flavours of Libre OA licenses.

My only difference with Paul Royster is that the primary target for OA is peer-reviewed journal articles, and for that it is not just repositories that are needed, but Green OA mandates from authors’ institutions and funders.

P.S. To forestall yet another round of definitional wrangling: Even an effective Gratis Green OA mandate requires some compromises, namely, if authors elect to comply with a publisher embargo on Green OA, they need merely deposit the final, refereed, revised draft in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication -- and set the access as "restricted access" instead of OA during the (allowable) embargo. The repository's automated email copy-request Button will allow any user to request and any author to provide a single copy for research purposes during the embargo with just one click each. (We call this compromise "Almost-OA." It is a workaround for the 40% of journals that embargo Gratis Green OA; and this too is a necessary first step on the road to 100% immediate Green Gratis OA and onward. I hope no one will now call for a formal definition of "Almost-OA" before we can take action on mandating OA...)

A peer-reviewed journal article is either accessible to all of its potential users or it is not accessible to all of its potential users (but only to those at subscribing institutions).

Open Access (OA) is intended to make articles accessible (online) to all their potential users, not just to subscribers, sothat all potential users can read, use, apply and build upon the findings, not just subscribers.

OA comes in two forms:

Gratis OA means an article is accessible online to all its potential users.

Libre OA means an article is accessible online to all its potential users and all users also have certain re-use rights, such as text-mining by machine, and re-publication.

For individual researchers and for the general public the most important and urgent form of OA is Gratis OA.

The reason Gratis OA is so important is that otherwise the research is inaccessible except to subscribers: OA maximizes research uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

The reason Gratis OA is so urgent is that lost research access means lost research impact and progress. The downloads and citations of papers made OA later never catch up with those of papers made OA immediately:

Gentil-Beccot, A., Mele, S., & Brooks, T. C. (2010). Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy physics: Scientometrics, 84(2), 345-355.

The date when a peer-reviewed paper is ready to be made OA is the date when the final, peer-reviewed draft is accepted for pubication.

Sometimes there can be delays of months between the date of acceptance and the date of publication of the pubisher’s version of record (VOR).

And some (a minority) of publishers have imposed embargoes of up to 12 months from the date of publication before authors can make their articles OA.

The delay from acceptance to publication, and the delay from publication till the end of any OA embargo all add up tp lost research access, uptake, usage, applications and progress.

DOE and OSTI have been directed by OSTP to adopt a policy that ensures that OA is provided to federally funded research — by 12 months after the date of publication at the very latest.

This is not a mandate to adopt a policy that ensures that OA is provided "at the very latest possible date."

Yet that is what DOE has done — no doubt under the influence of the publishing industry lobby.

The interests of research and researchers -- and hence of the public that funds the research -- are that the research should be made OA as soon as possible.

The interests of (some of) the publishing industry are that it should be made OA as late as possible.

The DOE has adopted a policy that serves the interests of the publishing industry rather than those of research, researchers and the tax-paying public.

This is why DOE policy has been so warmly welcomed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) as well as CHORUS (a publisher consortium expressly created to try to keep access-provision and the timing of compliance with open access mandates under the control of publishers rather than fundees and their institutions).

The simplest remedy for this is not necessarily that the permissible OA embargo length needs to be reduced (though that would be extremely welcome and beneficial too!).

Even within the constraints of a permissible OA embargo of 12 months at the very latest, there is a simple way to make the DOE policy much more powerful and effective, guaranteeing much more and earlier access.

All that has to be done is to make immediate deposit of the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft, in the author’s institutional repository, mandatory immediately upon acceptance.

Not just the metadata: the full final draft.

If the author wishes to comply with a publisher OA embargo, the deposit need not be made OA immediately.

Institutional repositories have an automated copy-request Button with which a user can request a single copy for research purposes, and the author can comply with the request, with just one click each.

This is not OA, but it is almost-OA, and it is all that is needed to maximize research access, usage and progress during any permissible OA embargo.

And besides maximizing access during any permissible OA embargo, requiring immediate institutional deposit also mobilizes institutions to monitor and ensure timely compliance with the funding agency’s requirement.

The metadata for the deposit can be exported from each institutional repository to the DOE PAGES portal immediately, and then the portal, too (like google and google scholar), can immediately begin referring users back to the Button at the institution so the author can provide almost-OA with a single click until the end of any embargo.

There is no need whatsoever to wait either for the publisher’s VOR, or for the end of the publisher’s embargo, or for Libre OA re-use rights: those can come when they come.

But immediate institutional deposit needs to be mandated immediately.

Otherwise the DOE is needlessly squandering months and months of potential research uptake, usage and progress for federally funded research.

Please harmonize the DOE OA policy with the corresponding EU OA policy, as well as the HEFCE OA policy in the UK, the FRS OA policy in Belgium, and a growing number of institutional OA policies the world over.

Stevan Harnad

Richard Poynder: "If you were composing the Subversive Proposal today how different would it be? Would it be different? If so, would you care to rephrase it to fit today’s environment? In other words, how would the Subversive Proposal look if written for a 2014 audience (in less than 500 words)?"

SH: Knowing now, in 2014, that researchers won’t do it of their own accord, I would have addressed the proposal instead to their institutions and funders, and in less than 200 words:

"To maximize the access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact of your publicly funded research output, mandate (require) that the refereed, revised, accepted final draft of all articles must be deposited in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication as a condition for research evaluation and funding. If you allow a publisher embargo on making the deposit OA (freely accessible to all online), implement the automated almost-OA Button (and don’t let the embargo exceed 6-12 months at most). This is called “Gratis Green OA.” Do not pay for Gold OA journal publication fees (“Fool’s Gold”) until global Green OA has made subscriptions unsustainable; then you can pay for Fair-Gold out of your subscription cancellation savings. Fair-Gold will also be Libre OA (with re-use rights such as data-mining, re-mixing and re-publishing). Ignore publishers’ lobbying to the effect that Green OA will destroy peer-reviewed journal publishing: it will re-vitalize it and save the research community a lot of money while maximizing the access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact of their research."

And this is how I should have written the original Proposal in 1994:

FREE ONLINE ACCESS TO REFEREED RESEARCH: A SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL

Abstract: We have heard many predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day. It is applicable only to refereed scientific and scholarly journal articles (but that is the lion's share of the research corpus anyway), a body of work for which authors (researchers) do not and never have expected to SELL their words. They want only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes of their peers, their fellow scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another's work in that collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry.
      For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of research journal articles made the Faustian bargain to allow a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its intended readership because that was the only way to make their work public in the era when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) were the only way to do so. But today there is another way, and that is by depositing it in the author's institution's online repository:
      If every research institution in the world this very day established a globally accessible online institutional repository for every piece of refereed research output from this day forward, and if all research institutions and research funders mandated (required) that the final, refereed drafts of all their research output must be deposited in the repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, the long-heralded transition to free online access would follow almost immediately.
      The only factor standing in the way of this transition at the moment is the fact that peer review happens to be implemented today almost exclusively by journal publishers. If all scholars' refereed final drafts were universally available to all scholars online, institutions could cancel their journal subscriptions and refereed journal publishers would then have to restructure themselves, phasing out their obsolete print and online editions, access-provision and archiving and their costs, and downsizing to just implementing the peer review service, paid for by researchers' institutions out of their subscription cancellation savings.
      The subversion will be complete, because the refereed research literature will have taken to the airwaves, where it always belonged, and those airwaves will be free (to the benefit of us all) because their true minimal expenses will be covered the optimal way for the unimpeded flow of research findings to all: In advance.

Important Addendum and Correction from Eloy Rodrigues (June 19):

The CAS mandate is for immediate deposit:

CAS requires its researchers and graduate students to deposit an electronic version of the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of their research articles, resulting from any public funded scientific research projects, submitted and consequently published in academic journals after the issuing of this policy, into the open access repositories of their respective institutes at the time the article is published, to be made publicly available within 12 months of the official data of publication.

And CAS already has a network of IRs. Xiaolin Zhang the CAS Library Director has been a very active OA and IR advocate.

The two Chinese OA Mandates (NSFC and CAS) came fast (2014), but the possibility of complying with them is coming slowly (no repository till 2016).

In addition, articles need not be deposited until 12 months after publication.

In most fields, especially the fast-moving sciences, the benefits of Open Access (maximised uptake, usage, impact and progress) are biggest and most important within the first year of publication. That is the growth tip of research. Access losses in the first year are never fully caught up in later years. The iron needs to be struck when it is hot.

There are two very simple steps that China can take to minimise the needless loss of research uptake, usage and impact because of lost time:

(1) China should set up the repositories immediately, using the available free softwares such as EPrints and DSpace. It requires only a server and a few hours worth of set-up time and the repository is ready for deposits. There is no reason whatsoever to wait two years. It would also be sensible to have distributed local repositories — at universities and research institutions — rather than just one central one. Each institution can easily set up its own repository. All repositories are interoperable and if and when desired, their contents can be automatically exported to or harvested by central repositories.

(2) Although an OA embargo of 12 months is allowed, China should mandate that deposit itself must be immediate (immediately upon acceptance for publication). Access to the deposit can be set as closed access instead of OA during the embargo if desired, but EPrints and DSpace repositories have the “Request-Copy” Button for closed-access deposits so that individual users can request and authors can provide an individual copy for research purposes with one click each. The repository automatically emails the copy if the author clicks Yes.

DSpace follows (not quite "leads"!) EPrints in providing access (not quite "Open Access"!) to research during publisher OA embargo periods (via the facilitated Request-Copy Button):

http://duraspace.org/node/2133
Just in time, I hope, to help shape the implementation of the US Public Access Policy by ensuring that mandatory deposit is (1) immediate (not waiting to deposit only after the allowable OA embargoes of publishers have elapsed) and (2) institutional (not institution-external).

Institutions can then (a) monitor and ensure compliance with the US Public Access Policy and (b) implement the institutional repository's facilitated Request-Copy Button which allows the author to provide an individual copy to an individual requestor with a single click on a case by case basis during the publisher's OA embargo period.

(Both metadata and full-texts of institutional deposits can then be automatically exported to or harvested by any central repositories desired: disciplinary, national, or even funder-based.)

To derive the full benefit of the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act, it is now extremely important that all universities and research institutions implement the faciltated copy-request Button in their institutional repositories. (The repository software as well as the Button are free for all.)

The Button ensures that even during a publisher embargo on Open Access (OA) any researcher worldwide can immediately request and any author can immediately provide a single copy of any embargoed deposit for research purposes with just one extra click each — just as long as the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft has been deposited in the repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, rather than only after a publisher OA embargo period has elapsed.

This is not OA. It is only “Almost-OA.” But the copy-request Button ensures that the immediate-deposit does not lie fallow during any allowable OA embargo period. And that’s what research and researchers need most.

For DSpace Repositories: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy
For EPrints Repositories : http://wiki.eprints.org/w/RequestEprint

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Coombe, RJ Wershler, D & Zellinger, M (Eds) Dynamic Fair Dealing. U Toronto Press