Open Access Archivangelism

There is a blatant contradiction between two statements of Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishers policy on Green OA self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft. It is not clear whether IOP is on the side of the angels or...:

A. There is this one, according to which IOP is and remains on the side of the angels:

...Exercise of the rights in 3.3 additionally must not use the final published IOP format but the Named Author’s own format (which may include amendments made following peer review).

….3.3.2  Include the Article (all or part) on a Named Author’s own personal web site;


3.3.3  Include the Article (all or part) on web sites of the Institution (including its repository) where a Named Author worked when research for the Article was carried out; and


3.3.4  Include the Article (all or part) on third party web sites including e-print servers, but not on other publisher’s web sites.

G. Then there is this one (amidst a lot of puffery about Gold OA publication), according to which "IOPScience" is on the other side:

What is IOP's policy on self-archiving?

IOP also supports authors who are required by their funding agencies to make their research papers freely available via an institutional or subject repository. Authors may post their accepted manuscript in an institutional or subject repository after an embargo period of 12-24 months following publication, depending on the journal.

Question for the Managing Director of IOP Publishing (Steven Hall): Which is it? Angels or...? And if this is a difference between IOP policy and "IOPScience" policy, it would be very helpful to have a clear explanation of which is which, and which journals are involved in each.

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Addendum

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I may be mistaken, but I think IOP may be conflating IOP journal embargo policies and IOP repository embargo policies. 

According to IOP's current online documentation (not only the current IOP general copyright form, but also the current IOP copyright FAQs - see below), IOP authors may immediately deposit the author's final draft in their institutional repository (or a central repository, like Arxiv). No embargo. No fee:

IOP | For Authors Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

e-print servers

12. I have submitted my article to an IOP journal. Can I also submit it to
arXiv.org or any other repository as well?

Yes, articles may be posted on non-commercial third party websites, including arXiv and other repositories. The author’s own original format should be used (which may include amendments made by the author following peer review). This is the version commonly known as the accepted manuscript. If possible, citation information should be included with IOP’s copyright notice. Once the final version has been published, best efforts must also be made to include a link to the online abstract of the paper in the journal. Authors MUST NOT deposit the published IOP formatted version. IOP also requests that you include the following statement of provenance: 'This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in [insert name of journal]. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The definitive publisher authenticated version is available online at [insert DOI].'

When submitting an article to arXiv you have to select a licence or declaration which gives the arXiv the rights necessary to distribute your article. IOP is happy for you to select the first option offered, namely 'arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive licence to distribute your article'. Please do not accept any of the other options without consulting with IOP in advance at permissions@iop.org.
See also Question 17 below.

Author’s rights after publication by IOP

17. May I post my paper on my personal website or my institutional website?
Yes, IOP authors can place their papers (all or part) on their own personal website, but they must not use the IOP formatted version of record (PDF or HTML). Instead they can make use of the article in their own format, which can include amendments made following peer review. This is the version commonly known as the accepted manuscript. The purpose of the posting must be non-commercial, if possible should display citation information and IOP’s copyright notice. Once the final version has been published, best efforts must be made to include a link back to the online abstract in the journal. Authors MUST NOT post the published IOP formatted version. IOP also requests that you include the following statement of provenance: 'This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in [insert name of journal]. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The definitive publisher authenticated version is available online at [insert DOI].'

IOP authors may also place their papers on the website of the institution (including its repository) where a named author worked when research for the article was carried out, however there is an embargo period that can vary between journals so please refer to the individual journal copyright forms. Typical embargo periods range from 12-24 months.

For posting on e-print servers see Question 12 above.

There is no mention at all made of exceptions -- by journal. However, there is a mention of an exception by repository: For some (unspecified) reason, IOP authors may not deposit their final drafts in NIH's PubMed Central:

 13. What is IOP’s policy with regard to UK PubMed Central and NIH?
On or after acceptance for publication IOP authors may deposit their articles in PubMed/NIH provided the articles are embargoed for public release for 12 months from the official date of publication and further provided the deposited version is in the author’s own original format (which may include amendments made by the author following peer review). This is the version commonly known as the accepted manuscript. Authors MUST NOT deposit the published IOP formatted version. IOP also requests that you include the following statement of provenance: 'This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in [insert name of journal]. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The definitive publisher authenticated version is available online at [insert DOI].'

IOP is currently considering introducing a service to deposit articles at UK PubMed Central and NIH for authors in the future.

Now this exception (though a rather arbitrary one) would still leave IOP on the side of the angels. Could someone from IOP please confirm whether this continues to be the only exception (apart from rival publishers' 3rd-party repositories, of course)? That would serve to correct the apparent contradiction with the following June 2011 update:

IOP Publishing open access policy

What is IOP's policy on self-archiving?
IOP also supports authors who are required by their funding agencies to make their research papers freely available via an institutional or subject repository. Authors may post their accepted manuscript in an institutional or subject repository after an embargo period of 12-24 months following publication, depending on the journal.

Publishing a gold OA journal (New Journal of Physics, NJP), as IOP does, is admirable, but if I am not mistaken, IOP publishes 29 journals -- plus 38 more in partnership with other learned societies. I will assume (conservatively) that the IOP FAQ speaks only for the 29 journals published by IOP (although IOP's one pure open access journal, NJP, is one of the partnered journals). Open access means open access to all the articles in all the 29 IOP journal, not just the articles in NJP. 

Not that being "on the side of the angels" means that all 29 IOP journals need to be gold OA journals: it just means that all 29 IOP journals endorse author self-archiving of the final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication (green OA). That is what the current IOP copyright agreement states clearly in clause 3.3.2 and 3.3.3 and the current IOP copyright FAQ states clearly in clause 12 and 17.

Being "on the side of the angels" has become a metaphor in the OA world for endorsing immediate green OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, as IOP had done since at least 2006. 

Regarding the sustainability of the subscription model, Alma Swan reported in 2005 that IOP and APS, the publishers with the longest experience with green OA self archiving, dating all the way back to 1991, and having long ago reached 100% in several fields, responded as follows:

"In a separate exercise we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite --in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)."

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CODA

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Now it would look unprepossessing in the extreme, would it not, if a publisher were to air the following policy today:

"We are progressive publishers, not trying to oppose OA: You may make your final draft green OA by depositing it in your institutional repository -- except if you are mandated to do so (by your funder or institution), and especially if your funder or institution is foolish enough to offer to pay for gold OA. In that case, you may only deposit it if you pay; or must wait 12 or 24 months if you don't -- even if you've already been providing immediate green OA for free for 'lo these 20 past years already..."

Apart from offering to sell its authors immediate (gold) Open Access publishing for an extra fee, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) continues to embargo (green) Open Access self-archiving by its authors until 6 months after publication.

Yet in its promotional press release, NPG writes of itself:

"Our liberal self-archiving policy and free manuscript deposition service remain an important part of our open access offering and service to authors."

From NPG's License to Publish [emphasis added]:

"When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication.

"NPG recognizes the balance of rights held by publishers, authors, their institutions and their funders (Zwolle principles, 2002), and has been a progressive and active participant in debates about access to the literature. In 2002, NPG was one of the first publishers to allow authors to post their contributions on their personal websites, by requesting an exclusive licence to publish, rather than requiring authors to transfer copyright. NPG actively supports the self-archiving process, and continues to work with authors, readers, subscribers and site-license holders to develop its policy."

Yes, NPG was indeed in 2002 among the first publishers to request an exclusive license to publish instead of requiring a copyright transfer from its authors.

But what did that mean?

That new policy was at first clouded in uncertainty as to whether or not it meant that NPG was endorsing immediate, unembargoed author self-archiving of the author's final, refereed, accepted draft (green OA).

Then in January 2003 NPG indicated that it did indeed endorse immediate, unembargoed author self-archiving of the author's final draft (green OA), as over 60% of journals (including almost all the top journals -- including, notably -- Nature's rival, Science) have likewise done since.

But then in January 2005 NPG back-slid, imposing a 6-month embargo on self-archiving (and instead liberally offered to help ensure that the self-archiving was not done by NPG authors any earlier than 6 months after publication, by offering its authors a free "Manuscript Deposition Service" to take the self-archiving entirely out of the hands of its authors, with NPG doing the self-archiving in their place, for free -- after the embargo!). For authors who nevertheless desired immediate OA for their papers, some NPG journals went on to offer the option of paying NPG about $3000-$5000 (over and above all the subscriptions already generously paying OA for publication) for immediate (hybrid gold) OA.

That means NPG is today among the minority of journals (and the even tinier minority of the top journals) not to endorse immediate OA self-archiving.

If NPG wishes to promote itself as "liberal on OA," it needs to drop its embargo on green OA, like the rest of the majority of journal publishers that are genuinely on the side of the angels in their policy on green OA (such as APS, IOP, APA, ACS, the Royal Society, Springer and Elsevier).

If not, then NPG's embargo on green OA, its paid gold OA option, and its "liberal" willingness to take the chore of self-archiving out of the author's hands is more accurately construed as a marketing strategy to restrict green OA and increase extra revenues from selling gold OA in its place.


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Important Update Update (July 15 2013)
More Fell Fallout From Finch Folly: The Royal Society Relapse

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[updated 27/6/10]
The Royal Society is fully green again, endorsing unembargoed OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, thereby reinstating the world's most venerable publisher on the side of the angels, where it belonged all along, historically.

With much gratitude from the research community and posterity!

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In its OA FAQ, the Royal Society OA misdefines Green OA as follows:

"Green open access: Authors may deposit a pre-print of their article in a repository at any time and they may deposit the final, accepted manuscript version of their article in a repository from 12 months after publication."

Whereas one can be agnostic about the hybrid gold OA option that the RS and many publishers are offering (including the promise of transparency in translating hybrid Gold OA uptake increases into subscription price reductions), this takes on an entirely different complexion if the publisher is not Green (as, for example, CUP, APS, IOP, AAAS, Springer and Elsevier all are, whereas OUP and NPG, and now possibly the RS, are not).

For if the publisher imposes a 1-year embargo, that is tantamount to a constraint -- on any author that needs and wants immediate OA -- to pay for the hybrid Gold OA option instead of just providing Green OA.

See also: Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society (2005)

Oxford University Press Journals has issued a highly misleading press release -- "Open Access Uptake: Five Years On," not making it clear that it is not Open Access (OA) uptake that is declining, but merely the uptake of OUP's pricey "Oxford Open (OO)" paid hybrid-Gold OA option. 

OUP offers its authors the option of paying (a sizeable sum) to have an article that has been published in OUP's subscription journals made OA (freely accessible online). Each OUP journal continues to collect subscription income, and the rest of its articles continue to be non-OA, but the paid-up OO articles are made OA by OUP -- along with a promise to lower OUP journal subscription costs proportionately, as hybrid Gold uptake increases. So this OUP press release is really just telling us that the uptake for the OO option is not increasing, but decreasing.

What is stated, however, is that it is OA uptake itself that is decreasing, which is the very opposite of the truth.

Globally, across all journals, "Green OA" self-archiving, by authors, of their own articles in OA repositories -- already 2-3 times the uptake of OUP's paid hybrid Gold OA option -- is increasing, not decreasing, in no small part because Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors' institutions and funders, requiring them to deposit their articles in OA repositories, are increasing.

The existence of the Green OA option is also the obvious explanation of why OUP's OO hybrid Gold uptake is low: Why should authors pay for Gold OA when they can provide Green OA for free (especially while subscriptions are still paying the costs of publication -- as well as tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA)? 

But OUP does not mention Green OA. Nor does it mention that OUP is among the minority of major publishers that have not yet given their green light to their authors to provide Green OA immediately upon acceptance for publication, instead attempting to impose an embargo of 12 to 24 months on Green OA (perhaps in the hope of forcing their authors to resort to paying for the OO option instead).

OUP is definitely not giving a good account of itself as the history of OA is writing itself today. Cambridge University Press (CUP), for example, among university publishers, The American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Science magazine), among learned-society publishers, and even Elsevier and Springer, among commercial publishers are among the majority that are behaving far more responsibly and progressively than OUP, being on the "side of the angels" insofar as endorsing the immediate Green OA option for their authors is concerned.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In February 2010, University of Hong Kong signed a hybrid Gold OA "Open Choice" agreement with Springer.

In October 2008 in ROARMAP, University of Hong Kong proposed to the University Grants Committee (RGC/UGC) an Open Access Mandate for all RGC/UGC-funded research.

It is not yet clear whether in the meantime this mandate has actually been adopted, by either HKU or RGC/UGC. The proposed mandate itself was an almost-optimal one:

It was an Immediate-Deposit mandate, but it seems to have misunderstood the fact that a postprint can be deposited in the Institutional Repository without having to seek "permission" from the publisher. Permissions are only at issue at all for the date when the deposit can be made Open Access:

ii. [HKU RGC/UGC-funded researchers] should send the journal the Hong Kong author’s addendum (University of Hong Kong, 2008), which adds the right of placing some version (preprint or postprint) of the paper in their university’s institutional repository (IR). If necessary, seek funds from the RGC to pay open access charges up to an agreed limit; perhaps US$3,000...

iv. deposit all published papers in their IR, unless the journal refuses in writing. If the published version is refused, deposit the preprint or postprint, as allowed in number ii above...

The proposed mandate's language makes it sound as if HKU wrongly believes that it needs to pay the publisher for the right to deposit!

It is to be hoped that this will be clarified and that the deposit mandate will be adopted (both for RGC/HGC-funded research and for unfunded HKU research) before HKU begins to pay any publisher anything at all.

Otherwise, as the Houghton Report shows, HKU is gratuitously paying a lot more money for a lot less OA and its benefits.

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On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse

SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university's potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university's total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible to a university's users. (In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable.) Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA.

The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now

ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (“Open Access,” OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al’s modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing industry. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research.

Springer's Already on the Side of the Angels: What's the Big Deal?

SUMMARY: The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has made a deal with Springer that articles by VSNU authors will be made OA. But Springer is already on the side of the angels on OA, being completely Green on immediate, unembargoed author OA self-archiving. Hence all VSNU authors are already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of their Springer articles in their institutional repositories, without requiring any further permission or payment. So what in addition is meant by the VSNU deal with Springer? that the Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be deposited? That Springer does the deposit on VSNU authors' behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA? In the case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate (from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders like NWO) to make them OA. There are some signs, however, that this too might be on the way...

University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without Mandating Green OA

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Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has made a deal with Springer that articles by VSNU authors will be made OA. But Springer is already on the side of the angels on OA, being completely Green on immediate, unembargoed author OA self-archiving. Hence all VSNU authors are already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of their Springer articles in their institutional repositories, without requiring any further permission or payment. So what in addition is meant by the VSNU deal with Springer? that the Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be deposited? That Springer does the deposit on VSNU authors' behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA? In the case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate (from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders like NWO) to make them OA. There are some signs, however, that this too might be on the way...

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In a press release entitled "Dutch higher education sector convinced of need for Open Access," the SURF Foundation in the Netherlands wrote:

"The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has reached agreement with Springer that in 2010 all articles by Dutch researchers in Springer journals will be made available Open Access, subject to the author agreeing. Other publishers too are providing opportunities for Open Access publication because they are following Springer in allowing researchers to arrange for Open Access when publishing their articles. Almost all publishers already allow researchers to upload the definitive author's version of their article to their institution's repository."

It would be very helpful if SURF or VSNU could explain a little more clearly what this means:

(1) Is it that VSNU has made a deal with Springer (as University of California has done) that articles by VSNU authors will be made OA?

(2) How will those articles be made OA?

Springer is already on the side of the angels, being completely Green on immediate, unembargoed author OA self-archiving. In other words, VSNU authors are all already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of their Springer articles in their institutional repositories, without requiring any further permission or payment.

Hence it is unclear what, over and above this, is meant by (1)? that the Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be deposited? That Springer does the deposit on author's behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA?

It is important to raise these questions, because in the case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate (from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders like NWO) to make them OA.

"One problem for scientists and scholars is the need to publish in prestigious and expensive journals so as to receive a good rating, which is important when applying for grants from organisations such as the NWO. Prof. Engelen said that the NWO would investigate ways of ensuring that publications in Open Access would count more significantly towards the author's 'impact factor.'"

Does this mean that Springer articles should now count more for NWO than they do now? Why? Should it not be the quality standards of each journal that determine how much it counts for NWO? (And also, of course, the citation impact of each article itself.)

Is being OA supposed to make an article count more? Why? (Especially since making an article OA has already been shown to increase its citation impact?)

Is this not the usual error, of assuming that "OA" means "published in a Gold OA journal" -- and assuming also that Gold OA journals are new journals, and have to compete with established journals in order to demonstrate their quality standards?

If so, why should any journal count more just because it is Gold OA?

And what about Green OA, which any Netherlands author can already provide for their articles, and especially with Springer articles, which already have Springer's endorsement for Green OA?

Green OA is already based on each journal's quality standards and track-record. No special preferential treatment is required.

"Paul Doop – a member of the board of Amsterdam University and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and chair of the ICT and Research platform board of SURFfoundation – argued that the problem could be solved by including a provision for mandatory Open Access in collective labour agreements."

This is certainly one possible way to mandate OA. Or, better, each VSNU university could simply adopt a policy, as over 100 universities worldwide have already done, that requires the deposit of all institutional refereed research output in the institution's repository.

But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the "problem" of making new Gold OA journals "count" more than they have earned with their quality standards, just as every other journal has done. Indeed, mandating Green OA has nothing to do with Gold OA journals at all (except that all Gold OA journals are also Green!)

"Many of those attending the seminar thought that was going too far. Prof. Engelen said, however, that his organisation was keeping close track of developments and that if insufficient progress had been made in a year’s time, the NWO would see whether it could make Open Access obligatory, as its sister organisations in the United Kingdom and the United States have already done."

This would be splendid. And I hope NWO will not wait so long to do what the US and UK (and many other countries) are already doing.

But it would be helpful if the very timely and commendable plan to mandate Green OA in the Netherlands is not conflated with the completely different question of paying for Gold OA, or with trying to make Gold OA journal articles "count" more.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Colin G. Scanes Editor-in-Chief Poultry Science (Poultry Science Association) wrote:

[T]here is self-interest from journals... whether... profit... or non-profit... in not supporting free open access. Equally there is strong self-interest in university libraries... supporting open access because they are likely to reduce their costs of purchasing journals.

-- There are also the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is conducted and published. That interest is in making the research accessible, immediately upon acceptance for publication, to all would-be users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access.

Hitchcock, S. (2010) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies

1. Who is to pay the very real costs of producing journals with this move to open access? Should it be the researcher, and, if so, where is the additional funding to come from? Is it realistic to consider that journals should absorb the costs

-- Open Access means free online access to published journal articles, not necessarily Open Access publishing. Authors can provide Open Access to their conventionally published articles by self-archiving their final refereed drafts free for all online.

2. At what point do libraries cease to purchase subscriptions for journals if their contents are available by open access?

-- No one knows whether and when libraries will cancel journals. Till they do, institutional subscriptions pay the cost of peer review and authors make their final drafts free for all online. If and when journal cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable because users prefer to use the free online drafts, journals will cut costs and downsize to providing peer review alone, paid for, per article, by authors' institutions, out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.

3. If library subscriptions to journals are an essential part of the business plan of a journal or a professional society, how many journals will disappear if we go to a completely open access approach?

-- No journals will disappear as a result of Open Access. Open Access is provided by author self-archiving (now being increasingly mandated by their institutions and funders) and if and when subscriptions fail, journals will downsize to peer-review service provision alone, paid for on the open access publishing service-fee model.

4. As a journal editor with, at present, a positive cash flow, we can and do waive page charges from papers from institutions in developing countries that cannot afford to pay these. We will not be able to continue this if there is a major reduction in revenue. Forcing journals to adopt an author-pays model would have a stifling effect on the publication of work from authors in developing countries.

-- No need to change anything (except to make sure the journal endorses rather than obstructs author self-archiving). Universal self-archiving and self-archiving mandates will provide universal Open Access, and the rest depends on how long subscriptions remain sustainable, and on whether and when the downsizing and transition to the Open Access cost-recovery model occurs.

5. What is a reasonable embargo period between publication and the paper being available by free open access?

-- What is optimal for research -- and for researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is conducted and published -- is no embargo at all. What is helpful from publishers is if they endorse Open Access self-archiving by authors. The rest will all come as a natural matter of course either way (i.e., with or without publisher endorsement), as a result of Open Access mandates by institutions and funders. The Green publishers will simply have the historic satisfaction of having been on the side of the angels all along.

Poultry Science's self-archiving policy is not in Romeo and does not appear to be among the 63% of journals that endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving by its authors. It would be helpful if this were remedied:

Poultry Science Copyright Release: Copyright laws make it necessary for the Association to obtain a release from authors for all materials published. To this end we ask you to grant us all rights, including subsidiary rights, for your article. You will hereby be relinquishing to the Poultry Science Association all control over this material such as rights to make or authorize reprints, to reproduce the material in other Association publications, and to grant the material to others without charge in any book of which you are the author or editor after it has appeared in the journal.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

My gratitude to Iryna Kuchma for having pointed out my error, and my sincere apologies to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for having thought otherwise, even for a moment! (I ought to have known, for I had registered the CAS mandate and announced it on 19 August 2009!)

Unlike the Netherlands, U California, U. Goettingen, Max-Planck Institutes, the COPE members, and indeed SCOAP3, the Chinese Academy of Sciences did indeed first mandate Green OA, before committing to pay for Gold OA.

This policy is exemplary and unexceptionable. Let's hope the rest of the world will follow it. (And shame on me for having imagined otherwise!)

The recent criticisms of ACM's stance on open access (OA) by Naty Hoffman (and others) are misguided. ACM is on the side of the angels regarding OA.

(1) ACM is Green. ACM is among the 51% of publishers (publishing 63% of journals) who are completely green on self-archiving. (ACM endorses immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft in the author's institutional repository.)

(2) Locus of Deposit Matters for Mandates. For authors -- as well as for institutions and funders who are attempting to mandate OA -- it makes an enormous difference where deposit is mandated: Divergent central (i.e., institution-external) vs. institution-internal deposit mandates from authors' funders and institutions (2a) require multiple deposit of the same paper by authors, and thereby (2b) put funder mandates in competition with institutional mandates (needlessly handicapping and discouraging, especially, the all-important institutional mandates), whereas convergent inititutional deposit mandates by both funders and institutions reinforce and facilitate one another.

(3) Locus of Deposit Does Not Matter for Users. For users, it does not matter in the least where an OA paper is deposited (as long as the repository is OAI-compliant), because all deposits can be, and are being, centrally harvested, by multiple central OAI harvesters (like citeseer, base, oaister, scirus, google scholar, and the ever more powerful central harvesters whose creation will be inspired by Green OA deposit mandates) -- if only we help OA happen by grasping what is already fully within our reach (by supporting Green OA institutional deposit mandates, and those publishers, like ACM, that facilitate rather than obstruct them) rather than over-reaching and insisting on more than we need now, only to continue to get next to nothing.

Yes, the interests of learned-society publishers like ACM -- and indeed those of any refereed journal publisher -- are not more important than the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders. But research interests are not well-served if we demonize even those publishers, like ACM, who are already on the side of the angels on OA, nor if we gratuitously over-reach instead of grasping what's already within reach.

Please send OSTP and President Obama the simple, convergent message that is guaranteed to bring us universal OA in short order, at long last: Mandate depositing the final refereed draft of all funded research into the fundee's own institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. -- No more, no less.

ACM -- unlike the other 49% of publishers -- is not standing in our way.

(And there is absolutely nothing wrong with ACM continuing to produce their fee-based Digital Library to try to compete with the free central harvesters of OA content, just as there is nothing wrong with ACM continuing to produce their fee-based proprietary ACM print and online editions of the journal articles to try to compete with the OA drafts [and to recover the cost of peer review]. The future will take care of itself, but please let us not keep holding it back by gratuitously insisting on more than necessary today.)

See also: "APA Kerfuffle Redux: No, ACM is NOT Anti-OA"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEGATIVE ASPECTS:

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

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

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

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

Now I reply to Robert's responses:

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

RK: "Stevan

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

"1. Empty repositories?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, again, for no good positive reason whatsoever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Wellcome Trust has always argued that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum