Open Access Archivangelism

An update of Harvard computer scientist Michael Merzinich's "The ACM Does NOT Support Open Access" (discussed here yesterday) reports that ACM has made it clear it is fully Green on OA self-archiving, but that discussions with Harvard are still underway for the extra re-use rights stipulated in the Author's Addendum.

The nuances here are about the differences between "gratis" OA (free online access) and "libre" OA (free online access plus certain further re-use rights).

I will make no secret of what my own view on this is -- and I've been at this for a very, very long time: Free online access ("gratis OA") is all you need in order to make all the rest happen. The rest will come with the territory, eventually; but the territory must come first. Gratis OA can be and is being mandated by universities and funders (but so far there are only 77 mandates, out of a potential worldwide total of 10,000 or more).

Libre OA asks for more, and entails more complications. Hence it is both harder to agree on adopting a Libre OA mandate, and harder to get compliance (rather than opt-out). The right strategy is hence to stick to mandating Gratis OA for now. Gratis OA is urgent; addenda can wait. The "Green" journals that have already formally endorsed providing immediate Gratis OA (63%) are on the side of the angels. It is foolish and counterproductive to demonize them. If one wants to rant at journals, rant at the pale-green ones, that only endorse self-archiving unrefereed preprints, and that embargo Gratis OA to the refereed postprints (34%); or the gray journals, that don't endorse any form of self-archiving at all (3%).

Libre OA will come, as surely as day follows night, once we have reached universal Green Gratis OA. To insist on over-reaching instead for Libre OA now (by insisting on Libre OA author addenda), instead of grasping the Green Gratis OA that is already within our reach (yet still not being grasped by 99.937% of the universities and funders on the planet) is just one of a long litany of gratuitous mistakes we keeping making over and over, needlessly delaying the optimal, inevitable, obvious and long overdue outcome, year upon year.

The "over-reaching" list is long, and includes the sublime and the ridiculous: Libre OA (re-publishing and re-use rights for refereed journal articles, when Green Gratis OA would already have them online free for any user webwide, 24/7), Gold OA publishing, central (rather than institutional) self-archiving, the publisher's PDF (rather than just the author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft), peer-review reform, publishing reform, copyright reform, freeing all "knowledge" (rather than just freeing all of refereed research first), solving "the" digital preservation problem, solving "the" online search problem, etc. etc.

Mark my words. We will no doubt continue this fruitless frenzy of over-reaching in all directions for some time to come (world hunger may be next on the OA agenda) instead of doing the immediately doable (which is the mandating of universal Green Gratis OA by all universities and all funders), but in the end it will become clear that in order to have all the good things worth having among the things that can be nontrivially linked to OA, all we ever had to do was those those simple 99,937 GG mandates (plus the distributed volley of keystrokes they entail).

Suggested Exercise:
Test What Already Comes with the Gratis Green OA Territory:

"Re-use rights for teaching" are as good example as any of how people are simply not thinking through what really comes with the territory with Gratis Green OA:

If you deposit your article, free for all, in Harvard's Institutional Repository (IR), every teacher and every student webwide has 24/7 access to it -- can link to it, read it on-screen, download it, print it off, data-crunch it.

The days of permissions and "course packs" (for refereed journal articles) would be over -- completely over -- if all universities and funders mandated that all their employees' and fundees' refereed journal articles (the authors' final refereed drafts) were deposited in their IRs, thereby making them Gratis Green OA (the kind ACM endorses).

Now try that out as an intuition pump with some of the other things you thought you desperately needed the Author's Addendum for, over and above GG OA...

There will be a few -- a very few. But none of them will be remotely as important and urgent as Gratis Green OA itself. Yet here we are, holding up GG OA because we are holding for and haggling over needless Author's Addenda instead of working to universalize vanilla GG OA.

And even the very few uses that don't come immediately with the GG OA territory will follow soon after, once we have reached or neared universal GG OA.

First things first... Or, Let not the Best stand in the way of the (immeasurably) Better...

Amen.

Now back to the soothing fulminations against ACM for not immediately conceding the re-use rights that the author-addendum mandates are needlessly insisting upon...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The suggestion that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) does not support Open Access (OA) is incorrect (as was a similar suggestion about the American Psychological Association (APA) a year ago). The ACM is fully Green on both preprint and postprint self-archiving: it already formally endorses immediate, unembargoed deposit in the author's Institutional Repository (IR). What the ACM does not support is the blanket adoption of the author's addendum, which asks for more than this.
    The author's addendum is welcome when there is agreement to adopt it; but it is not necessary in order to provide OA when the journal is already Green on OA (as 63% of journals already are). All ACM authors can already make their articles OA without it. The institutions that mandate Green OA self-archiving via the author's addendum should optimize their mandates so that their authors can comply with them by depositing in their IR even without also having to adopt the author's addendum when publishing in fully Green journals, rather than leaving authors with no option but to opt out of depositing altogether in such cases, if the journal does not agree to adopt the author's addendum. (Harvard has already provided a Procedural FAQ stating that compliance requires deposit even when the author opts out of adopting the author's addendum.)

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Harvard's Michael Mitzenmacher suggests -- though somewhat cautiously, acknowledging that there might be some misinformation involved -- that "The ACM Does NOT Support Open Access."

This is reminiscent of a similar case last July, in which it was the APA (American Psychological Association) that was being raked over the coals as being anti-OA (for trying to charge a $2500 deposit fee for making a direct central deposit in PubMed Central in compliance with NIH's Green OA self-archiving mandate). The APA later backed off the fee, but even before that I had to point out that the APA was already on the side of the angels insofar as OA was concerned, because it was completely Green on immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving of both the preprint and the postprint -- but only in the author's Institutional Repository (IR). Since this already makes the IR deposit OA, I suggested that it was NIH that ought to optimize its mandate by allowing authors to fulfill it through direct deposit in their own IR, instead of insisting on direct central deposit in PubMed Central; the metadata of the IR deposit can then be automatically exported to PubMed Central via the SWORD protocol. (NIH is now considering adopting this option.)

By exactly the same token, it is completely incorrect to say that the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) does not support Open Access. Just like the APA, the ACM is completely Green on both preprint and postprint self-archiving. That means it too endorses immediate, unembargoed deposit in the author's institutional repository. What the ACM does not support is the author's addendum, which asks for more than this.

Current standard ACM copyright agreement:

    Rights Retained by Authors and Original Copyright Holders Under the ACM copyright transfer agreement, the original copyright holder retains... the right to post author-prepared versions of the work covered by ACM copyright in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer, and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others...

Author's Addendum:

    Author’s Retention of Rights. Notwithstanding any terms in the Publication Agreement to the contrary, AUTHOR and PUBLISHER agree that in addition to any rights under copyright retained by Author in the Publication Agreement, Author retains: (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for noncommercial purposes; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorize others to make any non-commercial use of the Article so long as Author receives credit as author and the journal in which the Article has been published is cited as the source of first publication of the Article.

Now the author's addendum is a fine, indeed desirable thing, when there is agreement to adopt it; but it is not necessary in order to provide OA -- and particularly not when the journal is already Green on OA (as 63% of journals already are). So since the ACM journals are all already completely Green, there is no need for the author's addendum. ACM authors can already make all of their ACM articles OA without it. As in the case of NIH, the institutions that mandate Green OA via the author's addendum should optimize their mandates so that their authors can fulfill their mandates by depositing in their IR even without the author's addendum in the case of articles published in journals that are already Green on immediate OA self-archiving (as ACM journals are), rather than leaving authors with no option but to opt out of depositing altogether under those conditions. (Harvard has already modified its mandate so as to require deposit even when the author opts out of adopting the author's addendum.)

ACM's current President, Wendy Hall, is not only the one who adopted the world's first Green OA Mandate (when she was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton), but she was also instrumental in the adoption of the European Research Council's Green OA mandate, and other Green OA mandates as well. If she is to be written to -- as Michael Mitzenmacher suggests -- it should be to thank her for her enormous contributions to OA, rather than to complain that ACM has not yet agreed to the author's addendum.

In Defense of the American Psychological Association's Green OA Policy (July 2008)
The OA Deposit-Fee Kerfuffle: APA's Not Responsible; NIH Is. PART I.
The OA Deposit-Fee Kerfuffle: APA's Not Responsible; NIH Is. PART II.

Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause (Feb 2008)

NIH Open to Closer Collaboration With Institutional Repositories (Feb 2009)

Harvard Mandate Adds ID/OA, Hurray! (Mar 2009)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Trying to morph incoming institutional non-OA journal-fleet subscriptions into outgoing institutional Gold OA journal-fleet "memberships" is incoherent and cannot scale across journals and institutions; alongside an institutional Green OA mandate, however, it is innocuous: The Green mandates will ensure the real, leveraged, scalable, unstoppable progress toward global OA. Without an institutional Green OA mandate, pursuing local Gold OA "memberships" is not only futile but a retardant on real progress toward global OA, creating instead an illusory local sense of progress that further distracts from and obscures what really needs to be done locally to generate global OA.

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On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Ivy Anderson (UCoP) (IA) wrote (about University of California’s (UC’s) arrangement with Springer to renew Springer journals on condition that all UC authors’ articles published in Springer journals are made Gold OA and deposited in UC’s Institutional Repository (eScholarship) by Springer):

IA: “Researchers’ apathy toward voluntary self-deposit (except in narrow disciplines) has begun to be viewed by some as an indicator of indifference – if scholars truly cared (the argument goes), the game should be changing much more rapidly, since they themselves are the true owners of the system.”

It is not quite accurate to say that researchers are apathetic about self-deposits. Rather, most universities and funders (with the exception of the 68 that have already done so) seem to be apathetic (or, more accurately, narcoleptic) about mandating self-deposit (Green OA).

The attitude of researchers themselves has been surveyed in several international, interdisciplinary studies, and their expressed view is consistent:

"The vast majority of authors (81%)...[in a Key Perspectives] international, cross-disciplinary author study on open access [with] 1296 respondents... would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate." (Swan 2005)

These author attitude-survey outcomes have since been confirmed in actual author behavior by Arthur Sale, whose studies have shown that, if (and only if) deposit is actually mandated, authors do indeed self-deposit, and their deposit rates rise from the global spontaneous (i.e., unmandated) rate of c. 15% to approach 100% within about 2 years of the adoption of the Green OA mandate. The 68 university and funder mandates to date are further confirming this (including NIH’s delayed upgrade to a mandate, with deposits up from <5% before the mandate to 60% within the first year of adoption).



The three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving until it is mandated are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need Green OA mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to deposit their research article output in their institution's repository, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper.

UC renewing Springer’s fleet of 2000 journals may have merits of its own, but apart from that it seems a pricey way to spare UC authors’ a few minutes’ worth of (Green OA) keystrokes.

IA: “The same can be said of author-sponsored gold OA (it is not that hard for an editorial board to resign and take its journal elsewhere – at least it should not be, if there were an obvious somewhere else to go).”

But a rather crucial difference is that universities and funders can mandate that their employees and fundees self-deposit, but they cannot mandate that their employees and fundees resign from editiorial boards, nor can they mandate that publishers provide Gold OA, as publishers are neither their employees nor their fundees.

Universities and funders can pay publishers to provide OA, evidently, but it is the wisdom as well as the scalability of that strategy that is at issue here! What looks as if it will work locally for one university, dealing with one publisher, does not scale up to 10,000 universities doing it with the publishers of 25,000 journals, not even for the subset of those journals that each university currently subscribes to: Annual university subscriptions to incoming journals or journal-fleets are fundamentally different from annual university “memberships” in exchange for the publication of outgoing articles: Articles are not published on the basis of an annual journal/publisher quota but on the basis of the individual peer-review outcome, per article, per journal.

IA: “Gold OA journals that require a one-to-one correspondence between ‘membership’ fees and author uptake are beginning to lose library support”

Exactly. (And "memberships" would never have had library support in the first place, if their incoherent scaling scenario had been thought through in advance, as above.)

Librarians have been at the vanguard of the Open Access movement from the beginning, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince the faculty in other disciplines university-wide to deposit, as well as to convince the university itself to mandate deposit. There is now something the Library Faculty can do on its own, to provide an example for the rest of the university, along the lines of Arthur's Sale's suggestion that rather than just waiting for university-wide mandates, "patchwork mandates" should be adopted at the laboratory, department or faculty level. The Library Faculty at Oregon State University has just shown the way, adopting the planet's first Green OA Mandate by a Library Faculty.

IA: “My own conversations and observations lead me to believe that for most authors, the difficulties and uncertainties, rather than the desirability of the outcome, are the main obstacle. But if academic administrators believe that researchers don’t care, then support for institutional repositories, which entail their own costs, will wither in difficult times. Large acts are needed, ones which place a significant amount of research output on an open access footing in ways that capture people’s interest and imagination. Harvard’s mandate is certainly one such act.”

You seem to have answered your own question: Mandate Green OA, as Harvard did.

And as to difficult times: We're in them! And there are few lower-cost investments for a university today -- a linux server, a piece of free software, a few days sysad set-up time, and a few days a year sysad maintenance time... plus the adoption of a (free of charge) Green OA self-archiving mandate -- that can generate benefits anywhere near the order of magnitude of the benefits of OA.

IA: “UC’s largescale arrangement with a major publisher is another...”

Not unless you can explain how it is to scale from just an ad hoc local arrangement between one university (even one as big as UC) and one (big) fleet-publisher to something that can work for all universities and all journals without dissolving into Escher-drawing incoherence.

IA: “In UC’s arrangement with Springer, UC-authored articles will be deposited in our eScholarship repository. If enough other institutions followed suit (and 3 other European organizations have already preceded us), a large number of papers in those journals will be available in institutional repositories. Some of my librarian colleagues (the ones most skeptical of this experiment) have told me that if that happens, their institutions will cancel, and the system will convulse.”

Please explain to me how paying for Gold OA for a university’s own article output, in a particular journal or journal-fleet, via a university subscription/membership for that journal or journal fleet, will induce cancellations of that journal or journal-fleet: Who will cancel? The nonsubscribing institutions? (They have nothing to cancel.) The subscribing institutions? But then what happens to their own authors’ Gold OA output to that journal or journal-fleet? And what happens to their own users’ need for access to that journal or journal-fleet, if the Gold OA is no longer being paid for? And how do you cancel journals when they are still part Gold OA and part not?

My guess is that not even a small fraction of these awkward contingencies has even been considered by UC, let alone thought-through, in this somnambulistic plunge into institutional gilded OA deals. Nor is it in any publisher’s interest, in negotiating a Big Deal like this, to awaken their client to any of these troublesome complications (since complications concern how that client is to deal with that publisher's competitors, further down the road, once this particular “Big Deal” is no longer the only deal in town...).

Just to clarify: My beef is not at all with Springer, for trying to make the best deal they can. Springer is fully Green on immediate, unembargoed self-archiving by their authors. That means Springer is squarely on the Side of the Angels, insofar as OA is concerned. My beef is with the naivete of the universities who keep somnambulating toward the Escherian glitter without first grasping the green that is within their reach: Mandate Green OA and then make whatever subscription/membership deal you like and can afford. Just don't go for the Gold without first grasping the Green!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Unfortunately, far too much of what is stated in "coglanglab's" well-meaning blog posting about Conyers' Bill H.R. 801 is simply incorrect, starting with its title:

"Congress Considers Killing Open-Access Journals"

No, the Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is not considering killing open-access journals; it is considering killing NIH's right to mandate that its fundees must deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that have been published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals. The Bill has nothing to do with open-access journals.

"A recent movement has led to the creation of open-access journals, which do not charge access fees. This movement has gained traction at universities (e.g., Harvard) and also at government agencies."

The "open-access journal movement" has indeed been gaining some traction, but this has next to nothing to do with either the Conyers Bill or the Harvard and NIH mandates, which have nothing to do with open-acesss journal publishing: Harvard and NIH mandate that faculty and fundees deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that are published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals.

"NIH recently required the researchers they fund to publish in journals which are either open-access or make their papers open-access within a year of publication."

No, the NIH did no such thing. It required the researchers they fund to deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals -- and to make those deposits openly accessible within a year of publication."

Fortunately for the for-profit journal system, Congress is considering H.R. 801, which would forbid NIH and other government agencies from implementing such policies."

The issue has nothing to do with for-profit vs. nonprofit journal publication. The publishers lobbying against the NIH policy include not only for-profit publishers but nonprofit publishers such as the American Chemical Society and the American Physiological Society.

"The conceit of the bill is that NIH is requiring researchers to give up their copyrights, though of course researchers hardly ever -- and, as far as I know, never -- retain the copyrights to their works. Publishers require the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication."

The "conceit" of Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is that the government should not be allowed to require researchers to make their research open access even when the research has been supported by public funds because that could interfere with the publishers' right to make a return on their investment.

(The Conyers Bill will fail because the public investment in research is incomparably greater than the publisher's, because the government's contractual conditions on that funding predate any agreement the fundee makes with the publisher, and because repository deposit can be mandated even without requiring that access to the deposit be immediately made open access: The repositories' semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can tide over would-be users access needs during any embargo.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: A publisher that has a Green policy on OA self-archiving (by the author) is removing the single biggest obstacle to Green OA (hence to OA), as well as to Green OA Mandates by authors' institutions and funders, namely, the author's worry that to self-archive would be to violate copyright and/or to risk not being published by his journal of choice. No one is asking non-OA publishers to support OA -- just not to oppose it. What will ensure that not only a small fraction of authors but all authors provide Green OA is Green OA mandates. Green OA mandates are facilitated by publishers with Green policies on OA self-archiving. That does not, however, require that publishers agree to allow 3rd parties to download their proprietary files automatically (simply because authors themselves cannot be bothered to do the requisite keystrokes), for that would be tantamount to asking publishers to become Gold OA publishers.

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On 26 November 2008, Colin Smith [CS], Research Repository Manager of the Open University's Open Research Online (ORO), sent the following posting to UKCORR-DISCUSSION (which I reposted on the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

CS: "A short while ago I mentioned on this list that Elsevier are producing PDFs of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript and publishing them online as part of their 'Articles in Press' system (see attached example). The 'Accepted Manuscript' will stay online until the 'Uncorrected Proof' replaces it.

"Everyone knows that Elsevier's [author self-archiving] policy (like [that of] most other publishers) allows the use of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in repositories, but I wondered whether they would be happy about us making us of the 'Accepted Manuscript' version they are producing and publishing online.

"The answer (officially – from Daviess Menefee, Director of Library Relations at Elsevier) is 'yes'.

"This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) a window of opportunity to always get hold of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript for Elsevier items (assuming your institution subscribes to the journal in question). The 'window of
opportunity' is that time between which the 'Accepted Manuscript' appears online and is replaced by the 'Uncorrected Proof'."

Elsevier's Senior Vice President Karen Hunter [KH] followed up with this clarification:

KH: "As much as Elsevier appreciates praise for its policies, we also want to prevent misunderstanding.

"We are grateful that Colin Smith, Research Repository Manager of the Open University, approached us with a question on our author posting policy. Mr. Smith had noticed that for some journals an early "accepted manuscript" version of an author's paper was available on ScienceDirect and he wanted to know if authors could download it and deposit it to their institutional repositories. As our longstanding policy permits authors to voluntarily post their own author manuscripts to their personal website or institutional repository, we responded that we would not object to an author downloading this version.

"However, our broader policy prohibits systematic downloading or posting. Therefore, it is not permitted for IR managers or any other third party to download articles or any other version such as articles-in-press or accepted manuscripts from ScienceDirect and post them. To the extent that Colin Smith's message could be read as encouraging IR managers to download, it is a misinterpretation of our position."

I [SH] , in turn, followed up with this AmSci posting:

SH: Karen Hunter's response is very fair, and Elsevier's policy on author self-archiving is both very fair and very progressive -- indeed a model for all Publishers that wish to adopt a Green OA policy.

I know there will be extremists who will jump on me for having said this, and I am sure nothing I say will be able to make them realize how unreasonable they are being -- and how their extremism works against OA.

Green OA self-archiving provides the opportunity for achieving universal OA precisely because it is author self-archiving. Thus is it is perfectly reasonable for Green publishers to endorse only self-archiving, not 3rd-party archiving; to endorse self-archiving in the author's own institutional repository, but not in a 3rd-party repository; and to endorse depositing the author's own final draft, not the publisher's draft.

The fact that we do not yet have universal Green OA is not publishers' fault, and certainly not Green publishers' fault. The only thing standing between us and universal Green OA is keystrokes -- authors' keystrokes. And the way to persuade authors to perform those keystrokes -- for their own benefit, as well as for the benefit of the institutions that pay their salaries, the agencies that fund their research, and the tax-paying public that funds their institutions and their funders -- is for their institutions and funders to mandate that those keystrokes are performed.

It would not only be unjust, but it would border on the grotesque, if the punishment for publishers who had been progressive enough to give their official green light to their authors to perform those keystrokes -- yet their authors couldn't be bothered to perform the keystrokes, and their institutions and funders could not be bothered to mandate the keystrokes -- were that their green light was construed as permission to automatically harvest from the publisher's website the drafts that their own authors could not be bothered or persuaded to deposit in their own institutional repository.

No. Open Access is a benefit that the research community needs to provide for itself. The only reasonable thing to ask of publishers is that they should not try to prevent the keystrokes from being performed. It would be both unreasonable and unfair to demand that publishers also perform the keystrokes on the authors' behalf, through automated downloads, for that would be tantamount to demanding that they become Gold OA publishers, rather than just endorsing Green OA.

What is needed is more keystroke mandates from institutions and funders, not more pressure on Green publishers who have already done for Green OA all that can be reasonable asked of them.

Mike Eisen [MBE], of Public Library of Science, then responded on AmSci. His response is excerpted here and interwoven with my replies:

MBE: "...I will proudly claim the mantle of an OA extremist if it means calling [them] on Elsevier's policy. I am very happy to see Karen Hunter's message, because it confirms what I and many others have been saying for years - that Elsevier only supports Green OA publishing because they know it will be adopted by a small fraction of their authors."

SH: (1) There is no Green OA publishing, there is only Green OA self-archiving (by the author).

(2) A publisher that is Green on OA self-archiving (by the author) is removing the single biggest obstacle to Green OA (hence to OA), as well as to Green OA Mandates by authors' institutions and funders: The author's concern that to self-archive would be to violate copyright and/or to risk not being published by his journal of choice.

(3) No one is asking non-OA publishers to support OA -- just not to oppose it.

(4) What will ensure that not only a small fraction of authors but all authors provide Green OA is Green OA mandates.

(5) Green OA mandates are facilitated by publishers with Green policies on OA self-archiving.

(6) None of this requires that publishers agree to allow 3rd parties to download their proprietary files automatically.

MBE: "What more evidence do you need that Elsevier is not actually committed to OA than this explicit statement that they prohibit the clearest and easiest path towards achieving Green OA to their published articles?"

SH: The clearest and easiest path to achieving Green OA to all published articles is for their authors to deposit them in their institutional repositories and for their institutions and funders to mandate that they deposit them in their institutional repositories. It is not Elsevier that is holding up that process. It is authors, in failing to self-archive of their own accord, and their institutions and funders, in failing to mandate that they self-archive.

The only relevant evidence from Elsevier here is that Elsevier has removed the obstacles to immediate author self-archiving, as well as to institutional and funder immediate self-archiving mandates. There is nothing more that needs to be asked of Elsevier on this score, nor anything more that Elsevier need do.

(I make no mention here about something else on which Elsevier can indeed be faulted, namely, that they are an active part of the publisher lobbying against Green OA mandates! But I think that on balance their Green policy and example on immediate OA self-archiving is far more of a help to progress on Green OA and Green OA mandates than the publisher lobbying against Green OA mandates is a hindrance; indeed the lobbying is failing, globally, and especially failing against individual institutional mandates, which are far less vulnerable to industry lobbying than governmental funding agencies, although those too are successfully resisting the industry lobbying.)

MBE: "Why should Elsevier care whether authors download the articles themselves or if someone else does it for them other than the expectation that in the former case, the practical obstacles will prevent most authors from doing so."

SH: Because construing a Green Light for authors to self-archive as a Green Light for 3rd-party "self"-archiving, and 3rd-party archives would be a carte blanche to 3rd-party rival publishers to free-ride on Elsevier content.

(Again, the distinction is completely mooted, in practical terms, by the nature of the Web and of Open Access: Once content is free for all in one place, it is free for all in any place, and there is scarcely any scope for "free-riding" on free content. But these are alas still early days, and while authors and their institutions and funders are still dragging their feet on self-archiving and self-archiving mandates, there is plenty of scope for free-riders to have a little field day with an Elsevier policy that allows anyone to download and re-use their proprietary files today.)

MBE: "Unless and until Elsevier radically restructures its business model for scientific publishing, they will only permit Green OA so long as it is largely unsuccessful - the moment it becomes possible to get most Elsevier articles in IRs they will have to end this practice, as their current policy against IR downloads makes abundantly clear."

SH: On this point, Mike, I am afraid we will have to continue to disagree, profoundly. You are an advocate of a direct transition to Gold OA publishing; I am not, because I see so clearly that universal Green OA is within reach, awaiting only universal Green OA mandates by authors' institutions and funders. Those universal Green OA mandates by authors' institutions and funders (which Elsevier's Green policy greatly facilitates) -- along with time itself -- make it increasingly difficult for publishers even to contemplate back-tracking on their Green policies.

So I think you are simply wrong about this back-tracking bugaboo, which is about as valid as the publisher lobby's repeated bugaboo that OA will destroy peer review.

You continue to be impatient for Gold OA, whereas my overtaxed patience is just for OA itself -- which, unlike Gold OA, is already within sight and reach. All it takes is universal Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders. Elsevier's Green policy is such a great help in that (even though even that help is not essential) that I think it far outweighs their lobbying against Green OA mandates. And it certainly outweighs their unwillingness to allow 3rd-party downloading of their proprietary files.

The discussion reached closure with Colin Smith's reply to Karen Hunter:

CS: "Karen, I very much appreciate you pointing out that my posting could have been interpreted as a rallying call to IR Managers and Administrators to systematically download Elsevier items on behalf of authors. This is not what I meant - my apologies.

"Where I originally said:

'This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) a window of opportunity to always get hold of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript for Elsevier items (assuming your institution subscribes to the journal in question).'

"I should have said:

'This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) the opportunity to inform our academics that there may well be an online version of their accepted manuscript that they can retrieve, should they have failed to retain it themselves.'

"I have to say that, while I am not averse to occasional third-party depositing, on the whole I believe Green OA can only be sustainable if the academics themselves are choosing to do it. If IR Managers and Administrators are busying around in the background, mass-uploading items without the knowledge of authors, yes your repository may grow substantially in size and it may look to the outside world that Green OA is taking off, but have you actually embedded OA into the culture of your institution? I suspect not. We have to encourage self-archiving because only by doing it themselves, engaging with their IR on a regular basis, will our academics become aware of how much there is to gain for what is actually very little pain [link added by SH].

"On that note, just to reiterate (and again I thank Karen for pulling me up on this), I am certainly not advocating that we in any way trawl Science Direct for accepted manuscripts. That would, in my opinion, be a non-sustainable approach and detrimental to the coexistence of IRs and academic publishing."

---

Elsevier Still Solidly on the Side of the Angels on Open Access


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: SHERPA/RoMEO is listing the paid OA charges of non-Green publishers. On no account should any author or institution ever have to pay money to a publisher in order to be able to comply with a mandate to provide Open Access (OA). That would be a perverse distortion of the purpose of both OA and OA mandates; it would also profoundly discourage funders and institutions from mandating OA, and authors from complying with OA mandates.
    SHERPA has an outstanding record for supporting and promoting OA, worldwide. The OA movement and the global research community are greatly in their debt. However, SHERPA alas also has a history of amplifying arbitrary, irrelevant and even absurd details and noise associated with publisher policies and practices, instead of focusing on what makes sense and is essential to the understanding and progress of OA.
    I urge SHERPA to focus on what the research community needs to hear, understand and do in order to reach 100% OA as soon as possible -- not on advertising publisher options that are not only unnecessary but counterproductive to the growth of OA and OA mandates. Authors and funders who are foolish enough to squander their money on paying non-green publishers for OA (instead of just depositing their postprints anyway and relying on the IR's "email eprint request" Button during any embargo) can find out the prices for themselves. SHERPA/ROMEO is not a publishers' price catalogue.

---

The SHERPA/RoMEO site says:

"Where a publishers' standard policy does not allow an author to comply with their funding agency's mandate, paid open access options may enable an author to comply."

On no account should any author have to comply with any mandate to provide Open Access (OA) by having to pay money to a publisher.

That would be a grotesque distortion of the purpose of both OA and OA mandates.

It would also profoundly discourage funders and institutions from mandating OA, and authors from complying with OA mandates.

If a journal is not one of the 63% of journals that are already Green on immediate OA self-archiving then the right strategy for the author is to deposit the refereed final draft in their institutional repository anyway, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Access to that deposit can then be set as Closed Access instead of Open Access during the publisher embargo, if the author wishes. The repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button can then provide all would-be users with almost-OA during the embargo.

Most OA mandates tolerate an embargo of 6-12 months. Once immediate deposit is universally mandated by 100% of funders and institutions, that will provide at least 63% immediate-OA plus at most 37% almost-OA, immediately, for a universal total of 100% immediate-OA plus almost-OA.

After OA mandates are adopted universally, the increasingly palpable benefits of the resulting OA for research, researchers, and the tax-paying public will ensure that the rest of the dominos will inevitably fall of their own accord: Access embargoes will soon die their natural (and well-deserved) deaths, yielding 100% immediate-OA.

SHERPA has an outstanding record for supporting and promoting OA, worldwide. The OA movement and the global research community are greatly in their debt. However, SHERPA alas also has a history of amplifying arbitrary, irrelevant and even absurd details and noise associated with publisher policies and practices, instead of focusing on what makes sense and is essential to the understanding and progress of OA.

I urge SHERPA to focus on what the research community needs to hear, understand and do in order to reach 100% OA as soon as possible -- not on advertising publisher options that are not only unnecessary but counterproductive to the growth of OA and OA mandates.

---

Charles Oppenheim, U. Loughborough, replied:

"Stevan misunderstands the purpose of SHERPA/ROMEO.  It is there to report publishers' terms and conditions, to help authors decide where to place their articles. To argue that it should not list those publishers that are not "green" is akin to asking an abstracting service not to record those articles that the editor happens not to agree with.
 
Some funders, such as Wellcome,  encourage the applicant for funding to include the cost of paying a "gold" journal in their funding bid. If it is to perform a useful information function, SHERPA/ROMEO has to reflect current reality, not ideal future scenarios."

I can only disagree (profoundly) with my comrade-at-arms, Charles Oppenheim, on this important strategic point!

I certainly did not say that SHERPA/ROMEO should only list Green Publishers! It should list all publishers (and, more relevantly, all their individual journals).

But along with all the journals, SHERPA/ROMEO should only list and classify the journal policy details that are relevant to OA, OA mandates, and the growth of OA.

Those four relevant journal policy details are these:

(1) Does the journal endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint? If so, the journal is GREEN.

(2) Does the journal endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of the unrefereed preprint only? If so, the journal is PALE-GREEN.

(3) Is the journal neither GREEN nor PALE-GREEN? If so then the journal is GRAY.

(4) If the journal is PALE-GREEN or GRAY, does it endorse OA self-archiving after an embargo? If so, how long?

That's it. All the rest of the details that SHERPA/ROMEO is currently canonizing are irrelevant amplifications of noise that merely confuse instead of informing, clarifying and facilitating OA-relevant policy and decisions on the part of authors, institutions and funders.

Amongst the irrelevant and confusing idiosyncratic publisher details that SHERPA/ROMEO is currently amplifying (and there are many!), there are two that might be worth retaining as a footnote, as long as it is made clear that they are not fundamental for policy or practice, but merely details for two special cases:

(i) What version is endorsed for OA self-archiving: the author's final draft or the publisher's PDF?

(ii) Where does the journal endorse self-archiving: the author's institutional repository and/or central repositories?

The reason these details are inessential is that the default option in both cases is already known a priori:

(i) Self-archiving the author's final draft is the default option. A publisher that endorses self-archiving the publisher's PDF also authorizes, a fortiori, the self-archiving of the author's final draft. (IP pedants and pundits might have some fun thrashing this one back and forth, citing all sorts of formalisms and legalisms, but in the end, sense would prevail: Once the publisher has formally authorized making the published article OA, Pandora's box is open [sic], and residual matters concerning authors' prior versions or subsequent updates are all moot [as they should be].)

The default option of self-archiving the postprint is sufficient for OA, hence the PDF side-show is a needless distraction.

(ii)  Self-archiving in the author's institutional repository is the default option. A publisher that endorses self-archiving in a central repository also endorses, a fortiori, self-archiving in the author's own institutional repository.

The default option of self-archiving in the institutional repository is sufficient for OA, hence the matter of central deposit is a needless distraction. (Where direct central deposit is mandated by a funder, this can and will be implemented by automatic SWORD-based export to central repositories, of either the metadata and full-text or merely the metadata and the link to the full-text.)

Hence (i) and (ii) are minor details that need only be consulted by those who, for some reason, are particularly concerned about the PDF, or those who need to comply with a funder mandate that (neelessly) specifies direct central deposit.

There is absolutely no call for SHERPA/ROMEO to advertise the price lists of GRAY publishers for paid OA! I can only repeat that that is grotesque. Let authors and funders who are foolish enough to squander their money on paying those non-GREEN publishers (instead of just relying on their tolerated embargo limits plus the Button) find out the prices for themselves. (SHERPA/ROMEO is not an abstracting service; nor is it a publishers' price catalogue!)

---

Peter Millington, SHERPA, replied:

PM: "It is a pity that Prof. Harnad is only interested in "default" and "sufficient" options, and not in the best options, or indeed the most appropriate options. While author's final post-refereed draft is sufficient and acceptable for open access and research purposes, it is not the best."

OA is the best for research purposes. We don't yet have it. And it's long overdue.

I'm not sure whose purposes the publisher's PDF is best for, but whoever they are, their purposes are getting in the way of what is best for research purposes.

PM: "The best is the published version (publisher's PDF if you will). At the very least, this is the authoritative version vis-à-vis page numbers for quoted extracts and the like."

This issue has been much discussed in these pages: OA is needed (urgently) for all those users who can't afford paid access to the publisher's PDF. What these would-be users lack is access to the text, not a means of quoting extracts. Extracts can be quoted by paragraph number. Pages are on the way out anyway. What is urgently needed is access to the text. Publishers are far more willing to endorse self-archiving of the author postprint than the publisher's proprietary PDF. Hence author postprint self-archiving is the default option (if maximal OA, now, is the goal).

PM: "Also, it significantly expedites deposition to be able to use the publisher's PDF rather than having to generate your own, with all the complications that that may entail."

Significantly expedites deposition of what, where, by whom? I have deposited nearly 300 of my papers in the Southampton ECS IR. It takes me 1 keystroke and 1 second to generate PDF from TeX or to generate PDF or HTML from RTF. What complications do you have in mind?

PM: "In my view, the publishers who permit the use of their PDFs deserve to be applauded for their far-sightedness. Other publishers should be encouraged to do likewise."

The publishers to be applauded are the ones that are Green on immediate OA deposit of the postprint, regardless of whether they specify the author's postprint or the publisher's PDF. That's the line separating who is and isn't on the side of the angels regarding OA. The rest is trivial and irrelevant.

PM: "SHERPA therefore makes no apologies for having published our 'good list'"

SHERPA ROMEO could do a far, far greater service in informing authors and institutions, and in promoting OA, if it at long last got rid of all its superfluous categories and colour codes (yellow/preprint, blue/postprint, green/preprint+postprint, white/neither, and now "good"/PDF) and simply published a clear list of all the journals that endorse postprint self-archiving, regardless of whether the postprint is author-draft or publisher PDF and regardless of whether the journal also happens to endorse unrefereed preprint self-archiving -- and call that GREEN.

That, after all, is what OA is all about, and for.

PM: "(Some may concur with Prof. Harnad in regarding the Paid OA list as the "bad list", but I couldn't possibly comment.)"

The only thing authors need to know about these journals is that they are GRAY (and perhaps also how long they embargo access-provision).

PM: "As for where material may be deposited, Prof. Harnad states that permission to deposit in institutional repositories should be the default, implying that this would be sufficient. However, as before, institutional repositories alone are not the best option. Surely the best policy must be to be able to deposit in any open access repository - institutional and/or disciplinary."

No, the best policy is to allow deposit in any OA repository and to explicitly prefer IR deposit wherever possible. That is the way to integrate institutional and funder OA mandates so as to generate a convergence and synergy that will systematically cover all of OA space quickly and completely.

PM: "In any case, SHERPA/RoMEO has no choice but to reflect/quote the terminology for repository types used in the publishers' open access policies, CTAs, and related documentation. These are often wanting in clarity and are not always fully thought through. If the publishers do better, it follows that SHERPA/RoMEO's data will also improve."

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if SHERPA/ROMEO could lead publishers toward clarity, rather than just following and amplifying their obscurity (and their often deliberate obscurantism)?

This is all said in the spirit of unabating appreciation for all that SHERPA does do for OA -- but with an equally unabating frustration at what SHERPA persists in not doing for (and sometimes unwittingly doing against) OA, even though it would be ever so easy to fix.

This continuing insistence upon amplifying incoherent publisher noise simply because it is there cannot be described as a service to OA. And SHERPA does have a choice: It can do better for the research community without waiting for publishers to improve.

---

Andria McGrath replied:

AM: "It may be foolishness on the part of the funders, but I'm afraid it is the case that ALL the UK medical funders do insist that articles reporting research funded by them are posted on UK PubMedCentral within 6 months."

I have a simple solution, both for individual authors and for institutions who are trying to comply with a funder mandate to self-archive centrally articles that are published by journals that only endorse institutional OA self-archiving:

(1) Deposit the (refereed) postprint institutionally, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

(2) If the journal is Green on immediate OA, make the deposit immediately OA (otherwise rely on the "email eprint request" Button).

(3) If setting access to the deposit to OA is embargoed, set the access to OA when the embargo is over.

(4) If a funder requires deposit in UK PubMedCentral, set up SWORD for your IR so it will export the deposit to UKPMC at the requisite time -- and then let UKPMC worry about access-setting for the UKPMC version.

The author has complied with the funder mandate by depositing in his IR immediately upon acceptance for publication, and by setting access to the IR deposit as OA at the end of the publisher embargo. 

That's all there is to it. Funders cannot mandate any more of an author. And if the funder wants to pay publishers for the right to make the central UKPMC version OA, let them pay the publisher themselves.

The funder mandates are deposit mandates, not payment mandates. Comply by depositing institutionally, providing OA institutionally, and exporting the deposit to UKPMC. That's all there is to it.

AM: "I have just been going through Romeo trying to determine which of the major publishers allow this without the payment of article processing charges and there are very few. So far I have come up with BMJ Publishing, CUP, Company of Bioloigsts and Nat. Acad. Sci. that do allow this."

Fine. When those IR deposits are exported via SWORD to UKPMC, there will be no charge to be paid. For publishers other than those four,  there may be; that is not the problem of the author or his institution. And anyone construing the funder mandates as implying that it is the problem of the author or his institution, and that the mandate entails any further expense to the author or his institution, is profoundly misconstruing the mandate, the rationale for the mandate, and the rationale for OA.

Andria, you will have to get used to the fact that steps have been taken without carefully thinking them through. The funder OA mandates were very timely and welcome, and extremely important historically. But some (by no means all!) of them were also vague, careless, and, to a great extent "monkey see, monkey do" (many taking their cue from NIH and the Wellcome Trust, who themselves had not thought it through carefully enough). 

MRC simply adopted the wrong (because inchoate) mandate model. Other RCUK councils (such as, ARC, BBSRC, STFC) picked a better one. So did Europe's ERC, and now the EC, based on the EURAB model, which is the IDOA mandate model, the optimal one, and leads to none of these nonsensical consequences.

Good sense will eventually prevail, but until then, those who are trying to implement the existing mandates should not try to put themselves through impossible hoops -- and on no account should they lead their authors and institutions into grotesque and gratuitous expenses or constraints that were never the intention of either OA or OA mandates.

Just follow the sensible steps (1) - (4) above, and the rest will take care of itself as a matter of natural course.

AM: "As far as I can tell, Elsevier, Humana, Int Med Press, Wiley, Karger, Kluwer, Royal Soc and Springer do not allow self archiving in UK PMC by authors within 6 months, so that all authors funded by the medical charities are going to be forced into paying article processing charges to comply with their funders requirements if they publish in these publishers journals or in fully open access journals that make charges, like BMC."

Not only is it pure absurdity to imagine that the funder mandates were actually mandates for authors and their institutions to pay publishers for paid OA, but it is equally absurd to imagine that they were mandates for authors to publish only with publishers who endorse central self-archiving! 

Every single one of the eight publishers you list is on the side of the angels as regards OA: They are all Green on immediate deposit in the author's institutional repository, and the immediate setting of access to that deposit as OA.

Did anyone really imagine that OA was about more than that? That it further required publishers to consent to deposit in central repositories, for someone's capricious reasons? (The saga is made even sillier by the fact that if the blinkered centralists had sensibly targeted universal IR deposit first, then the dominos would -- and will -- fall for central repositories soon enough anyway! But instead they are creating gratuitous obstacles for OA itself, by putting centrality itself before OA -- and for absolutely no good reason, since all OA IRs are fully interoperable and harvestable anyway.)

And don't even get me started on the fatuousness of having decided to copycat PMC with a UKPMC! As if there were another category of biomedical research, consisting of UK biomedical research, requiring a central repository of its own: "Let me see now, what is it that British researchers -- and British researchers alone -- have found discovered about AIDS." (I hope no one replies that "one can search across PMC and UKPMC jointly," because that is the whole point! Search is done across distributed contents, not by going to -- or requiring -- one particular locus-of-deposit. Think OAIster, Citeseer or Google Scholar, not UKPMC! At most, UKPMC could simply be a harvester of UK biomedical output, for actuarial purposes, wherever its physical locus might happen to be.)

AM: "In view of this I do find it useful to have the extra information that Romeo is adding, and I would welcome even more specific info about publisher's policies re PMC. If I have any of this wrong I would be very grateful if people would let me know."

I think you have a good deal of it very, very wrong -- but it's not your fault, and you are not alone. I just wonder whether we will persist in bumbling in this misdirection for a few more years, yet again, until we discover we have goofed, or we will manage -- mirabile dictu -- to rally the good sense to fix it in advance...

Your weary and fast-wizening archivangelist,

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

I am not at all sure that Kudos are in order for Oxford University Press (OUP), just because they offer authors at subscribing institutions a discount on their hybrid Gold OA fee:

Unlike the American Psychological Association (yes, the much maligned APA!), the American Physical Society, Elsevier, Cambridge University Press and all the other 232 publishers (57%) of the 6457 journals (63%) that are on the side of the angels -- fully Green on immediate post-print self-archiving -- OUP is among the Pale-Green minority of 48 publishers (12%) of 3228 journals (32%) (such as Nature, which back-slid to a postprint embargo ever since 2005).

OUP's post-print policy is:

12 month embargo on science, technology, medicine articles
24 month embargo on arts and humanities articles
Pre-print can only be posted prior to acceptance
Pre-print must not be replaced with post-print, instead a link to published [toll] version
Articles in some journals can be made Open Access on payment of additional charge

Should we really be singing the praises of each publisher's discount on their hybrid Gold OA fee for the double-payment they are exacting (from the subscribers as well as the authors)?

I would stop applauding as progress for OA every self-interested step taken by those publishers who do not first take the one essential OA-friendly step: going (fully) Green.

Yes, OUP are lowering fees annually in proportion to hybrid Gold OA uptake, but they are meanwhile continuing to hold the post-print hostage for 12-24 months.

In reality, all the fee reduction means is an adjustment for double-dipping -- plus a lock-in on the price of Gold OA, and a lockout of Green OA.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

      [see also PART I and PART 0]

SUMMARY: The concept underlying the OAI metadata harvesting protocol is that local, distributed, content-provider sites each provide their own content and global service-provider sites harvest that content and provide global services over it, such as indexing, search, and other added values. (This is not a symmetric process. It does not make sense to think of the individual content-providers as "harvesting" their own content (back) from global service-providers.)
    The question is accordingly whether OA deposit mandates should be (1) convergent, with both institutional and funder mandates requiring deposit in the author's own OA Institutional Repository (IR), for harvesting by global overlay OA services and collections (such as PubMed Central, PMC) or (2) divergent, requiring authors to deposit all over the map, locally or distally, possibly multiple times, depending on field and funding. It seems obvious that coordinated, convergent IR deposit mandates from both institutions and funders will bring universal OA far more surely and swiftly than needless and counterproductive divergence.
    In the interests of a swift, seamless, systematic, global transition to universal OA, NIH should accordingly make one tiny change (entailing no loss at all in content or functionality) in its otherwise invaluable, historic, and much-imitated mandate: NIH should mandate IR deposit and harvest to PMC from there.
    The spirit of the Congressional directive that publicly funded research should be made publicly accessible online, free for all, is fully met once everyone, webwide, can click on the link to an item whose metadata they have found in PMC, and the article instantly appears, just as if they had retrieved it via Google, regardless of whether the item's URL happens to be in an IR or in PMC itself.
    A possible reason the NIH mandate took the divergent form it did may have been a conflation of access archiving with preservation archiving: But the version that NIH has (rightly) stipulated for OA deposit (each "investigator's... electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication") is not even the draft that is in the real need of preservation; it is just a supplementary copy, provided for access purposes: The definitive version, the one that really stands in need of preservation, is not this author-copy but the publisher's official proprietary version of record.
    For preservation, the definitive document needs to be deposited in an archival depository (preferably several, for safe-keeping, updating and migration as technology evolves), not an OA collection like PMC. But that essential archival deposit/preservation function has absolutely nothing to do with either the author or with OA.

---

Peter Suber: "At the moment, I see two conflicting APA statements and no evidence that either statement [2002 or 2008] took the other into account. So I'm still waiting for a definitive clarification from the APA. But as I say, if the APA reaffirms the 2002 policy to allow no-fee, no-embargo self-archiving to IRs, then I will applaud it."

That will shortly sort itself out.

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[See APA update, which appeared after this posting. Peter has since responded to that update too. The only point to add is that Stuart Shieber's concern about a remaining ambiguity in yet another APA document will no doubt likewise be resolved in the same way. (Stuart was the architect of Harvard FAS's institutional OA mandate and has since been appointed director of Harvard's newly formed Office for Scholarly Communication.)]

---

It seems obvious to me that the only coherent resolution is that APA's 2002 Green OA policy takes precedence over the contradictory passages in APA's 2008 PMC addendum. It would be arbitrary bordering on dementia to declare that:

"Our policy is that any APA author may self-archive their own refereed final draft in their own IR for free as long they are not mandated to do so by NIH; but if they are mandated to do so by NIH, then they must pay us $2500 to do it!"

I predict that the proposed APA policy will first be:

"All we meant was that, as before, any APA author may self-archive their own refereed final draft in their own IR for free, but depositing APA's proprietary published version in PMC will cost $2500."

And then they will back down from the surcharge altogether. (I do have a bit of a track-record for correctly second-guessing APA policy!)

Peter Suber: "However, if the APA retains the "deposit fee" for NIH-funded authors, then I will continue to criticize it. The APA will still be charging for green OA, which is utterly unnecessary."

Do continue to criticize it, Peter, but please make sure the criticism is on target: As long as APA authors are free to provide green OA by depositing in their own IRs, APA can definitely not be said to be "charging for green OA" if APA charges authors for depositing in PMC (any more than I can be said to be charging for water if I say "water is free but bring your own container" and you insist on water in a container).

The $2500 fee is indeed absurd, but that absurdity (and a many other counterproductive consquences) would be completely remedied by NIH's simply dropping its supererogatory requirement to deposit directly in PMC, and harvesting the metadata from the IRs instead. A central collection like PMC is just that: a collection. It is sufficient for such collections to harvest the metadata (as Google does) and to link to the full-text where it is actually deposited, i.e., the IR of the institution it came from.

Peter Suber: "[APA] will still fail to deliver immediate OA, or OA to the published edition, which fee-based [Gold or optional-Gold] OA journals always deliver in exchange for their fees."

You mean the publisher's proprietary version? But even the NIH mandate is only requiring deposit of the author's final refereed draft, not the publisher's proprietary version:

The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act,2008).  The law states:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

I also think you may be equating the $2500 fee with a (hybrid) optional-Gold OA fee (from a non-Green publisher such as ACS). But it is not that. APA's is a PMC deposit fee, from a Green publisher. (There is no relevant category for a requirement to deposit in a 3rd-party CR, because it is arbitrary to have to do so, and has nothing to do with OA itself, which APA authors can already provide via Green OA in their own IRs.)

Moreover, to heap absurdity upon absurdity, we both know, Peter, that (1) not only does it not matter one bit, for OA accessibility to one and all, webwide, whether a document's locus is an IR or a CR, but (2) if and when all of OA's target content is made OA, one way or the other, then the distinction between 1st-party (author-institution), 2nd-party (publisher) and 3rd party (PMC, UKPMC, EuroPMC, Google, or any other CR) archiving becomes irrelevant, the game is over, universal OA has at last arrived, and all these trivial locus and party details as well as this absurd talk of deposit surcharges becomes moot.

The problem is with first reaching that universal OA, which is already long, long overdue (after many, many false starts, including a prior one by NIH itself, 3 years ago, which elicited a compliance rate below 4%, less than a third of the global average for spontaneous -- i.e., unmandated -- self-archiving.)

And coordinated, convergent IR deposit mandates -- funder mandates complementing institutional mandates -- will get us there far more surely and swiftly than the needless and counterproductive divergence we have imposed on ourselves by not thinking the PMC locus stipulation through in advance (or fixing it as it becomes more and more apparent that it creates unanticipated and unnecessary problems).

Peter Suber: "If the APA reaffirms its 2002 green policy, then NIH-funded authors could bypass the deposit fee when self-archiving to their IRs. But they couldn't bypass the fee when self-archiving to PMC, and they are bound by the NIH policy to deposit in PMC (or have their journal do so for them)."

Correct, but isn't this reasoning a bit circular, if not fatalistic? Which one is cluttering the path to universal OA (now that we have the invaluable NIH mandate)? APA, which blesses OA self-archiving in the author's own OA IR, for free, or NIH, which (unnecessarily) insists on mandating more than "merely" OA?

Would it not be better for NIH to think it through, and then -- patiently, in the interests of a swift, seamless, systematic, global progression to universal OA -- make in its otherwise invaluable, historic, and much-imitated mandate the one tiny change that (with no loss at all in content or functionality) will create the optimal conditions for a full-scale transition to universal OA, rather than only (the NIH/PMC) part of it?

Let NIH mandate IR deposit and harvest from there.

Peter Suber: "Stevan hopes that policies like the APA's will pressure the NIH to drop this requirement and allow deposits in an IR to suffice. But even if that ought to happen, it won't happen soon and very likely won't happen at all. One reason is simply that the requirement to deposit in PMC was mandated by Congress. The NIH undoubtedly supports the Congressional directive, but it's not an in-house policy decision that the agency is free to reverse at will."

Deposits in IRs can be harvested into PMC. The issue here is merely the locus of the point of direct deposit.

Does anyone imagine that the spirit of the Congressional directive -- to the effect that publicly funded research should be made publicly accessible online, free for all -- would not be fully met once everyone, webwide, can click on the link to an item whose metadata they have retrieved from PMC, and the article instantly appears, just as if they had retrieved it via Google, but the item's URL happens to be in an IR rather than in PMC!

Or are OA self-archiving issues being conflated with preservation archiving issues here (yet again, as so often happens, and inevitably at OA's expense)? If so, the preservation of what: "final, peer-reviewed manuscripts"?

---

Access Archiving or Preservation Archiving? One discerns the dead hand of digital preservationists here, pushing their worthy but distinct agenda, oblivious to the fact that the content they seek to preserve is mostly not even OA yet, and that the version that NIH has (rightly) stipulated for OA deposit (each "investigator's... electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication") is not even the draft that is in the real need of preservation, but just a supplementary copy, provided for access purposes: The definitive version, the one that really stands in need of preservation, is not this author-copy but the original itself: the publisher's official proprietary version of record. But is it not crucial, here especially, to raise the fundamental question: Is the NIH mandate an access mandate or is it a preservation mandate? For preservation, one needs to deposit a (digital and analog) original in an archival depository (preferably several, for safe-keeping, updating and migration as technology evolves), not an OA collection like PMC. That essential archival deposit/preservation function has absolutely nothing to do with either the author or with OA, and APA would certainly have no problem with a digital deposit requirement like that...

---

Peter Suber: "But should Congress and the NIH prefer PMCs to IRs? Maybe, maybe not. I see good arguments on both sides."

For OA functionality, the locus of deposit makes zero difference. For preservation, OA is beside the point and unnecessary. But for OA content-provision itself -- and not just for NIH-funded content, but for all of OA's target content, across all disciplines, institutions and nations -- locus of deposit matters enormously. There's no functionality without content. And I know of no good argument at all in favor of institution-external direct deposit, insofar as OA content-provision is concerned; only a lot of good arguments against it.

Peter Suber: "But they are irrelevant here because (1) the APA deposit fee would still [be] unnecessary"

Why is it just APA's absurd $2500 fee for PMC deposit that is singled out as being unnecessary (given that the APA is Green on free OA IR deposit): Is NIH's gratuitous stipulation of PMC deposit not likewise unnecessary (for OA)?

(This question is all the more germane given that the global transition to universal OA stands to benefit a lot more from NIH's dropping its gratuitous (and alas much imitated) deposit-locus stipulation than from APA's dropping its absurd bid for a PMC deposit fee.)

Peter Suber: "(2) there's no evidence that the APA was motivated, as Stevan is, to protest the preference for PMC --as opposed to (say) mandatory OA."

But I never said the APA was motivated to protest the preference for PMC! That really would be absurd. I am certain that APA (and every other non-OA publisher) is none too thrilled about either author self-archiving or mandatory OA, anywhere, in any form!

But APA nevertheless did the responsible thing, and bit the bullet on formally endorsing institutional self-archiving. There's no (OA) reason they should have to bite it on institution-external, 3rd-party archiving in PMC too (even though the distinction will eventually be mooted by universal OA) -- though the response of the OA community, if directed, myopically, at APA alone, and not NIH, will no doubt see to it that they will.

Frankly, I think APA just saw an opportunity to try to make a buck, and maybe also to put the brakes on an overall process that they saw as threatening to their current revenue streams. Can't blame them for thinking that; it may turn out to be true. But as long as they're Green, they're "gold," as far as OA is concerned (though, to avoid conflicting terminology, let us just say they are "on the side of the angels").

Peter Suber: "(For the record, my position is close to Stevan's: institutional and disciplinary repositories should harvest from one another; that would greatly lower the stakes in the question where an OA mandate should require initial deposit; if we got that far, I'd be happy to see a policy require deposit in IRs.)"

I'm afraid I can't quite follow Peter's reasoning here:

The issue is whether deposit mandates should be convergent -- requiring all authors to deposit in their own OA IRs, for harvesting by global overlay OA services and collections therefrom -- or divergent, requiring authors to deposit all over the map, possibly multiply, depending on field and funding, possibly necessitating "reverse-harvesting," with each institution's software having to trawl the web, looking to retrieve its own institutional output, alas deposited institution-externally.

(That last is not really "harvesting" at all; rather, it involves a functional misunderstanding of the very concept of harvesting: The OAI concept is that there are local content-providers and global service-providers. Content-providers are local and distributed, each providing its own content -- in this case, institutional IRs. Then there are service-providers, who harvest that content [or just the content's metadata and URL] from the distributed, interoperable content-providers, and provide global services on it, such as indexing, search, and other added values. This is not a symmetric process. It does not make sense to think of the content-providers as "harvesting" their own content (back) from the service-providers! Another way to put this is that -- although it was not evident at the time -- OAI-interoperability really meant the end of the need for "central repositories" (CRs) for direct deposit. Now there would just be central collections (services), harvested from distributed local content-providers. No need to deposit distally. And certainly no sense in depositing distally only to "harvest" it back home again! Institutional content-provision begins and ends with the institution's own local IR; the rest is just global, webwide harvesting and service-provision.)

Peter Suber: "Stevan does call the deposit fee absurd. So we agree on that as well. But he adds that the NIH preference for PMC over IRs "reduced us to this absurdity". I'm afraid that's absurd too. If the NIH preference for PMC somehow compelled publishers to respond with deposit fees, then we'd see many of them. But in fact we see almost none."

(1) Of course APA's $2500 deposit fee is absurd. But -- given that APA is Green on OA, and given the many reasons why convergent IR deposit, mandated by institutions as well as funders, not only makes more sense but is far more likely to scale up, coherently and systematically, to universal OA across disciplines, institutions and nations than divergent willy-nilly deposit of institutional content here, there and everywhere -- I welcome this absurd outcome (the $2500 PMC deposit fee) and hope the reductio ad absurdum it reveals helps pinpoint (and fix) the real source of the absurdity, which is not APA's wistful surcharge, but NIH's needless insistence on direct deposit institution-externally in PMC.

(2) I have no idea whether the OA community's hew and cry about the $2500 APA surcharge for PMC deposit will be targeted exclusively at APA (and any other publishers that get the same bright idea), forcing them to withdraw it, while leaving the dysfunctional NIH constraint on locus of deposit in place.

(3) I hope, instead, that the OA community will have the insight to target NIH's constraint on deposit locus as well, so as to persuade NIH to optimize its widely-imitated policy in the interests of its broader implications for the prospects of global OA -- one small step for NIH but a giant leap for mankind -- by fixing the one small bug in an otherwise brilliant policy.

Peter Suber: "Even if the NIH preference for PMC were a choice the agency could reverse at will, the APA deposit fee is another choice, not necessitated by the NIH policy and not justified by it."

Where there's a will, there's a way, and here it's an extremely simple way, a mere implementational detail: Instead of depositing directly in PMC, authors deposit in their IRs and send PMC the URL. If NIH adopted that, the APA's PMC deposit surcharge bid would instantly become moot.

If the furor evoked by the APA $2500 surcharge proved to be the factor that managed to inspire NIH to take the rational step that rational argument alone has so far been powerless to inspire, then that will be a second (unintentional) green feather in APA's cap, and another of the ironies and absurdities of our long, somnambulistic trek toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for scientific and scholarly research.

A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004)

Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy! (Jan 2005)

National Institutes of Health: Report on the NIH Public Access Policy. In: Department of Health and Human Services (Jan 2006, reporting 3.8% compliance rate after 8 months for its first, non-mandatory deposit policy)

Central versus institutional self-archiving (Sep 2006)

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? (Sep 2006)

THE FEEDER AND THE DRIVER: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)

Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)

Yet Another Reason for Institutional OA Mandates: To Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA Mandates (Feb 2008)

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates (Mar 2008)

One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind (Mar 2008)

NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate (Apr 2008)

Institutional Repositories vs Subject/Central Repositories (Jun 2008)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: So the American Psychological Association (APA) is trying to charge $2500 per article to fulfill NIH's Green OA mandate by proxy-depositing in PubMed Central on the author's behalf? So maybe if NIH had sensibly mandated depositing in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), this awkward problem wouldn't have come up? Like the majority of journals, APA journals -- unlike ACS journals -- are Green on authors self-archiving in their own IRs. There's still time to fix the NIH mandate so good sense can prevail...

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Although it looks bad on the face of it -- the American Psychological Association (APA) charging the author's institution and/or research grant $2500, not even for Gold OA publishing, but just for depositing the author's refereed final draft in PubMed Central (PMC) on the author's behalf ("proxy self-archiving"), in order to fulfill the NIH mandate -- things are not always as they seem.

There is no culprit in this nonsense, but if I had to pinpoint its provenance, it would be the foolish form in which the NIH -- despite relentlessly repeated advice and reasons to the contrary -- insisted on drafting its policy:

To cut to the quick, there is no earthly reason NIH should insist on direct deposit in PMC. The mandate should be (and should all along have been) to deposit in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR). PMC can then harvest the metadata and link to the IR-deposited full-text itself from there.

Unlike the American Chemical Society journals (which have unswervingly opposed Green OA), the American Psychological Association journals (after initial opposition, and eventually the majority of other journals) -- for reasons they would have found it very hard to justify flouting -- have long given their green light to immediate deposit (no delay, no embargo, and of course no fee) in the author's own IR:

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APA Policy on Posting Articles on the Internet

Update effective June 1, 2002

Authors of articles published in APA journals may post a copy of the final manuscript, as a word processing, PDF, or other type file, on their Web site or their employer's server after it is accepted for publication. The following conditions would prevail:

• The posted article must carry an APA copyright notice and include a link to the APA journal home page.
• Further, the posted article must include the following statement: "This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record."
• APA does not permit archiving with any other non-APA repositories.
• APA does not provide electronic copies of the APA published version for this purpose, and authors are not permitted to scan in the APA published version.

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To repeat, a publisher that is Green on immediate OA self-archiving in the author's own IR is squarely on the side of the angels. (If that publisher seeks to profit from NIH's gratuitous insistence on institution-external deposit, by treating PMC as a 3rd-party free-loader or rival publisher, hence legally requiring permission or payment to re-publish, I would say that NIH drew that upon itself. As noted many times, that technicality does not work with an author's own institution.)

And it is remediable: Simply revise the NIH mandate to require institutional IR deposit of the accepted final draft, immediately upon acceptance (with a cap on the permissible embargo length, if any). That is the sensible policy -- and nature will take care of the rest, with universal OA just around the corner.

A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004)

Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy! (Jan 2005)

National Institutes of Health: Report on the NIH Public Access Policy. In: Department of Health and Human Services (Jan 2006, reporting 3.8% compliance rate after 8 months for its first, non-mandatory deposit policy)

Central versus institutional self-archiving (Sep 2006)

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? (Sep 2006)

THE FEEDER AND THE DRIVER: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)

Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)

Yet Another Reason for Institutional OA Mandates: To Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA Mandates (Feb 2008)

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates (Mar 2008)

One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind (Mar 2008)

NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate (Apr 2008)

Institutional Repositories vs Subject/Central Repositories (Jun 2008)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Steve Inchcoombe, managing director of Nature Publishing Group writes, of Nature:

"We also support and encourage self-archiving of the author’s final version of accepted articles."

But if you look in the Romeo directory of publisher self-archiving policies, you will find that whereas Nature is indeed among the 92% of journals that have endorsed the immediate self-archiving of the author's unrefereed first draft (the preprint), Nature is not among the 63% of journals that have endorsed the immediate self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint) -- the one that is the real target of OA, and indispensable for research usage and progress.

Nature used to be "green" on the immediate self-archiving of both preprints and postprints, but, electing to take half of NIH's maximal allowable access embargo as its own minimum, Nature became one of the few journals that back-slid in 2005 to impose a 6-month embargo on open access to the peer-reviewed final draft.

It doesn't make much difference, because Institutional Repositories still have the almost-OA email eprint request-a-copy Button to tide over research usage needs during the embargo, but let it not be thought that Nature is still on the "side of the angels" insofar as OA is concerned...

Maxine Clarke, Publishing Executive Editor, Nature, replied: "Don't forget that people can always read the article in the journal, Stevan, as soon as it is published! The vast majority of scientists are either at an institution with a site license or can access the journal free via OARE, AGORA or HINARI, so they don't even have to take out a subscription."

But what about those would-be users worldwide who are "[n]either at an institution with a site license [n]or can access the journal free via OARE, AGORA or HINARI"? Is there any reason whatsoever why they should all be denied access for six months if they (or their institutions) do not "have [the funds] to take out a subscription"?

Because that, Maxine, is what OA is really all about.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum