Open Access Archivangelism

See also:
Raincoat Science: 43 More Open Access Haikus

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Bill Hubbard has just announced the winner of the SHERPA "Spirit of Open Access" competition:

Set your research free
As flowers offer nectar
To the passing bee

Miggie Pickton, University of Northampton, UK

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Here are my own (losing!) entries, submitted under the pseudonym of "Matthew Bashore," only five of them a strict 5/7/5, the rest increasingly minimalist. (My own entries and most of the others were, strictly speaking, more in the spirit of senryus than haikus.) (I've added a few, written since, that would have been dead giveaways.)

17:
scribbler and scholar
behind the self-same barrier
one unwillingly

the work of others
easier for me to steal
than donate my own

tithes to help cure plague
instead they're helping tradesmen
to peddle their wares

via eyes and minds
its path to noble laurels
my work firewalled

skies above all clear
cosmonauts still unembarked
worried flight's not cleared

fingertips so quick
stroke keys to boycott others
not to free their own

golden sun afar
blinds us to greener vistas
open to our view

yearning for freedom
we do not reach out for it
though its in our grasp

set it free at last
no lets fuss instead about
costs rights wrath and gold

why lord gautama
left india for china
keeps our fingers still

the elean sage
found no way to cross the room
we too paralyzed

what the tortoise asked
achilles to try in vain
we now must mandate

scholars all are monks
do monks have buddha nature?
answer still is mu

13:
give-away findings
free for all
no I want my cut

"roses red violets blue"
stays unread
till paid by you

eureka
see what I have found
first shell out to look

ideas doomed
to stillbirth
toll-booths loom ahead

11:
scholars' spring
skyward glance
trade winds gathering

new era
thoughts at long last free
pay to view

9:
fruits of IQ
unlike haiku
free

free at last
not so fast
toll-gates last

along the road
to Stockholm
toll-booths

8:
like speech
text if metered
lose/lose

7:
words fleet
script perdures
bits blocked

ideas
born free
enchained

me to you
no
first pay him

charity
pricily
sold

With every good intention, Jason Baird Jackson -- in "Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps" is giving the wrong advice on Open Access, recommending a strategy that has not only been tried and has failed and been superseded already, but a strategy that, with some reflection, could have been seen to be wrong-headed without even having to be tried:

• Choose not to submit scholarly journal articles or other works to publications owned by for-profit firms.
• Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not seek or accept the editorship of a journal owned or under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not take on the role of series editor for a book series being published by a for-profit publisher.
• Turn down invitations to join the editorial boards of commercially published journals or book series.

In the year 2000, 34,000 biological researchers worldwide signed a boycott threat to stop publishing in and refereeing for their journals if those journals did not provide (what we would now call) Open Access (OA) to their articles.

Their boycott threat was ignored by the publishers of the journals, of course, because it was obvious to them if not to the researchers that the researchers had no viable alternative. And of course the researchers did not make good on their boycott threat when their journals failed to comply.

The (likewise well-intentioned) activists who had launched the boycott threat then turned to another strategy: They launched the excellent PLoS journals (now celebrating their 5th anniversary) to prove that there could be viable OA journals of the highest quality. The experiment was a great success, and many more OA journals have since spawned, some of them (such as the BMC -- now Springer -- journals) of a quality comparable to conventional journals, some not.

But what also became apparent from the (now 9-year) exercise was that providing OA by creating new journals, persuading authors to publish in them instead of in their established journals, with their track-records for quality, and finding the funds to pay for the author publication fees that many of the OA journals had to charge (since they could no longer make ends meet with subscriptions) was a very slow and uncertain process.

There are at least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals published annually today, including a core of perhaps 5000 journals that constitute the top 20% of the journals in each field, the ones that most authors want to publish in, and most users want to access and use (and cite).

There are now about 5000 OA journals too, likewise about 20%, but most -- unlike the PLoS journals (and perhaps the BMC/Springer and Hindawi journals) -- are far from being among the top 20% of journals. Hence most researchers in 2009 face much the same problem that the signatories of the 2000 PLoS boycott threat faced in 2000: For most researchers, it would mean a considerable sacrifice to renounce their preferred journals and publish instead in an OA journal: either (more often) OA journals with comparable quality standards do not exist, or their publication charges are a deterrent.

Yet ever since 2000 (and earlier) there has been no need for either threats or sacrifice by researchers in order to have OA to all of the planet's peer-reviewed research output. For those same researchers who were signing boycott threats that they could not carry out could instead have used those keystrokes to make their own peer-reviewed research OA, by depositing their final, peer-reviewed drafts in OA repositories as soon as they were accepted for publication, to make them freely accessible online to all would-be users webwide, rather than just to those whose institutions could afford to subscribe to the journals in which they were published.

Researchers could have made all their research OA spontaneously since at least 1994. They could have done it OAI-compliantly (interoperably) since at least 2000.

But most researchers did not make their own research OA in 1994, nor in 2000, and even now in 2009, they seem to prefer petitioning publishers for it, rather than providing it for themselves.

There is a solution (and researchers themselves have already revealed exactly what it was when they were surveyed). That solution is not more petitions and more waiting for publishers or journals to change their policies or their economics. It is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate that their researchers provide OA to their own refereed research by depositing their final, peer-reviewed drafts in OA repositories as soon as they are accepted for publication, to make them freely accessible online to all would-be users webwide, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journals in which they were published.

I would like to suggest that Jason Jackson (and other well-meaning OA advocates) could do incomparably more for global OA by lobbying their own institutions (and funders) to adopt OA mandates than by launching more proposals to boycott publishers who decline to do what researchers can already do for themselves. (And meanwhile, they should deposit their articles spontaneously, even without a mandate.)

OA Week 2009 would be a good time for the worldwide research community to come to this realization at long last, and reach for the solution that has been within its grasp all along.

(P.S. The correlation between whether a journal is published by a for-profit publisher and whether it is an OA journal is at best a weak one. The American Chemical Society is one of the most regressive of journal publishers, and it is not-for-profit. Springer and Hindawi are both OA publisher and for-profit. But in any case, neither the problem nor the solution resides in publishers, for-profit or not. Both the problem and the solution is entirely in the hands of the research community, the providers of all research content, and it resides at the end of their fingertips.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The following re-posting from Peter Suber's OA News reconfirms that Elsevier is squarely on the side of the angels insofar as OA is concerned: Elsevier is and remains solidly Green on author self-archiving. So if there is any finger of blame to be pointed, it is to be pointed straight at the research community itself, not at Elsevier. If researchers desire Open Access, and fail to provide it by self-archiving their own articles, it is entirely their own fault, certainly not Elsevier's.
   And if researchers' institutions and funders are aggrieved that their researchers are not providing OA, yet they have failed to mandate that they do so, there is again no one else to fault but themselves.
  Read on. And then if you are a researcher and minded to complain about the absence of OA, please don't waste keystrokes demonizing publishers like Elsevier, or signing pious declarations, statements, manifestos, or boycott-threats: Direct your keystrokes instead toward the self-archiving of your own articles in your own Institutional Repository!

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Elsevier restates its self-archiving policy

Ways to Use Journal Articles Published by Elsevier: A Practical Guide, Elsevier, Version 1.0, June 2007. (Thanks to Rea Devakos.)

Elsevier compiled this guide for its journal editors, but it may also be useful for authors and readers.

Excerpt:

Elsevier believes it is important to communicate clearly about our policies regarding the use of articles we publish....However, this guide does not amend, replace or cancel any part of an existing license with Elsevier....

Authors publishing in Elsevier journals retain wide rights to continue to use their works to support scientific advancement, teaching and scholarly communication. An author can, without asking permission, do the following after publication of the author's article in an Elsevier-published journal:

Make copies (print or electronic) of the author's article for personal use or the author's own classroom teaching.

Make copies of the article and distribute them (including via email) to known research colleagues for their personal use but not for commercial purposes as described below [PS: omitted here].

Present the article at a meeting or conference and distribute copies of the article to attendees.

Allow the author's employer to use the article in full or in part for other intracompany use (e.g., training).

Retain patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the article.

Include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation.

Use the article in full or in part in a printed compilation of the author's, such as collected writings and lecture notes.

Use the article in full or in part to prepare other derivative works, including expanding the article to book-length form, with each such work to include full acknowledgment of the article's original publication in the Elsevier journal.

Post, as described below, the article to certain websites or servers.... Web posting of articles

Elsevier understands researchers want widespread distribution of their work and supports authors by enabling such distribution within the context of orderly peer review and publication.

Most journals published by Elsevier will consider (for peer review and publication) papers already posted in pre-publication versions to the Web. Pre-publication posting is common practice in, for example, physics and mathematics. However, some Elsevier clinical and biomedical journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals, follow the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and do not consider for publication papers that have already been posted publicly. Anyone with a question regarding pre-publication posting and subsequent submission of a paper to an Elsevier journal should consult that journal's instructions to authors or contact the editor.

An author can, without asking permission, do the following with the author's article that has been or will be published in an Elsevier journal:

Post a pre-print version of the article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and retain indefinitely this version on such servers or sites (unless prohibited in a specific Elsevier journal's instructions to authors).

Post a personal manuscript version of the article on the author's personal or institutional website or server, provided each such posting includes a link to the article's Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and includes a complete citation for the article. This means an author can update a personal manuscript version (e.g., in Word or TeX format) of the article to reflect changes made during the peer-review and editing process. Note such posting may not be for commercial purposes and may not be to any external, third-party website.

Elsevier-published authors employed by corporations may post their revised personal manuscript versions of their final articles to their corporate intranets if they are secure and do not allow public access.

This policy permitting open posting of revised personal manuscript versions applies to authors publishing articles in any Elsevier journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals.

If an article has multiple authors, each author has the same posting rights.

To preserve the integrity of the official record of publication, the final published version of an article as it appears (in PDF or HTML) in an Elsevier journal will continue to be available only on an Elsevier site....

Peter Suber, OA News

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Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
"Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving"

Cf: "Poisoned Apple"

"A Keystroke Koan For Our Open Access Times"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Academics strike back at spurious rankings
D Butler, Nature 447, 514-515 (31 May 2007)
doi:10.1038/447514b

This news item in Nature lists some of the (very valid) objections to the many unvalidated university rankings -- both subjective and objective -- that are in wide use today.

These problems are all the more reason for extending Open Access (OA) and developing OA scientometrics, which will provide open, validatable and calibratable metrics for research, researchers, and institutions in each field -- a far richer, more sensitive, and more equitable spectrum of metrics than the few, weak and unvalidated measures available today.

Some research groups that are doing relevant work on this are, in the UK: (1) our own OA scientometrics group (Les Carr, Tim Brody, Alma Swan, Stevan Harnad) at Southampton (and UQaM, Canada), and our collaborators Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough) and Arthur Sale (Tasmania); (2) Mike Thelwall (Wolverhampton); in the US: (3) Johan Bollen & Herbert van de Sompel at LANL; and in the Netherlands: (5) Henk Moed & Anthony van Raan (Leiden; cited in the Nature news item).

Below are excerpts from the Nature article, followed by some references.

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Universities seek reform of ratings

[A] group of US colleges [called for a] boycott [of] the most influential university ranking in the United States... Experts argue that these are based on dubious methodology and spurious data, yet they have huge influence...

"All current university rankings are flawed to some extent; most, fundamentally,"

The rankings in the U.S. News & World Report and those published by the British Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) depend heavily on surveys of thousands of experts - a system that some contest. A third popular ranking, by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China, is based on more quantitative measures, such as citations, numbers of Nobel prizewinners and publications in Nature and Science. But even these measures are not straightforward.

Thomson Scientific's ISI citation data are notoriously poor for use in rankings; names of institutions are spelled differently from one article to the next, and university affiliations are sometimes omitted altogether. After cleaning up ISI data on all UK papers for such effects... the true number of papers from the University of Oxford, for example, [were] 40% higher than listed by ISI...

Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands have similarly recompiled the ISI database for 400 universities: half a million papers per year. Their system produces various rankings based on different indicators. One, for example, weights citations on the basis of their scientific field, so that a university that does well in a heavily cited field doesn't get an artificial extra boost.

The German Center for Higher Education Development (CHE) also offers rankings... for almost 300 German, Austrian and Swiss universities... the CHE is expanding the system to cover all Europe.

The US Commission on the Future of Higher Education is considering creating a similar public database, which would offer competition to the U.S. News & World Report.

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Isidro Aguillo is the Scientific Director of the Laboratory of Quantitative Studies of the Internet of the Centre for Scientific Information and Documentation Spanish National Research Council and editor of Cybermetrics, the International Journal of Scientometrics, Informetrics and Bibliometrics.

In a posting to the American Scientist Open Access Forum, Dr. Aguillo makes the very valid point (in response to Declan Butler's Nature news article about the use of unvalidated university rankings) that web metrics provide new and potentially useful information not available elsewhere. This is certainly true, and web metrics should certainly be among the metrics that are included in the multiple regression equation that should be tested and validated in order to weight each of the candidate component metrics and to develop norms and benchmarks for reliable widespread use in ranking and evaluation.

Among other potential useful sources of candidate metrics are:

University Metrics
Harzing's Google-Scholar-based metrics
Citebase
Citeseer
and of course Google Scholar itself.

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Bollen, Johan and Herbert Van de Sompel. Mapping the structure of science through usage. Scientometrics, 69(2), 2006

Hardy, R., Oppenheim, C., Brody, T. and Hitchcock, S. (2005) Open Access Citation Information. ECS Technical Report.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35.

Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Invited Keynote, 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Madrid, Spain, 25 June 2007

Kousha, Kayvan and Thelwall, Mike (2006) Google Scholar Citations and Google Web/URL Citations: A Multi-Discipline Exploratory Analysis. In Proceedings International Workshop on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics & Seventh COLLNET Meeting, Nancy (France).

Moed, H.F. (2005). Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation. Dordrecht (Netherlands): Springer.

van Raan, A. (2007) Bibliometric statistical properties of the 100 largest European universities: prevalent scaling rules in the science system. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (submitted)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Comments on Cliff Lynch's "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points":
"Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?" Universities and research funders can and do mandate OA (Green) self-archiving. Cliff seems to be fixated on waiting instead for a transition to OA (Gold) Publishing (and a rather vague definition of OA as "reduced barriers"). He recognizes that Gold's asking price is too high, but not that the transition is also far too uncertain, has already wasted far too much time, and is out of the hands of the research community, whereas Green OA mandates are fast, sure, virtually cost-free, and entirely within the hands of researchers, their universities and their funders. Cliff thinks Green OA is "less optimal" for no reason other than that he thinks it will lead to "fragmentation": Of course it won't: the unifying glue for distributed journal articles is their metadata tags, including their journal's name, not the glue binding any journal's contents.
"Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers." Advice and support from universities (and funders) on retaining rights is welcome, but rights retention is not a necessary precondition for self-archiving, nor for mandating self-archivhiving; so if it poses any obstacle to agreement on immediate adoption of a self-archiving mandate (e.g., because researchers are concerned that rights retention might constrain their choice of journals or might put too big a negotiating burden on them), it should be dropped. On no account should rights-retention be a substitute or precondition for mandating deposit of all articles in the Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Even if the deposit is provisionally set as "Closed Access" during an embargo period, all immediate research usage needs can be fulfilled by each IR's semi-automatic individual EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button.
"We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies." It is not at all clear why we need to do that! What we need is OA. Green Self-Archiving mandates provide 100% OA. Publisher permission -- whether Scholarly Society or commercial -- is not required for funders and universities to mandate immediate deposit. It is not a conversion to Gold OA publishing that is being mandated. (Funders and universities can only impose mandates on their fundees and employees, not on publishers.) In any case, the funding of Scholarly Societies' "good works" should not be subsidized at the cost of researchers' lost usage and impact. (Cliff does not disagree, but the reason he wants to talk is because he is thinking only of Gold.)
"We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing." Cliff is right to be sceptical about Gold OA's current asking price but this is only an issue for those who for some reason want to promote immediate conversion to Gold OA, right now. For those who merely seek 100% OA now, the current price of Gold is irrelevant.
"Open Access Is Not a Threat to Peer Review: In Fact, It Has Nothing to Do with Peer Review -- but It Is Also Time to Talk about Peer Review." OA has nothing to do with peer review. Cliff wants to talk about peer review reform anyway. That's fine, but why in an OA context? The research community needs OA (to all peer-reviewed journal articles), now; peer-review reform is a different agenda.
"Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End: Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity." The research community needs OA (to all peer-reviewed journal articles), now; publishing reform is a different agenda.

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Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Thread:
"Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives" (started Mar 2003)

At the SPARC/ARL Forum on "Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research Policy Issues and Practical Strategies" (Oct 20 2006), Cliff Lynch presented "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points". Some of Cliff's six points are welcome and valid but a few are a bit more debatable:

Lynch: "1. Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?
"I don't want to spend time here arguing about a precise definition of open access -- suffice it to say that open access means an increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature..."

Unfortunately, it does not suffice to say that Open Access (OA) is just "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature."

OA is a very specific special case of the "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature," and it does not help to dissolve that specific case into the vaguer general category of "reducing barriers":

OA is free online access to peer-reviewed research journal articles.

Neither (i) the specific problem that OA is specifically meant to solve -- that of making research accessible to all its would-be users online -- nor (ii) the specific means of solving that specific problem is brought into focus by blurring the objective into generalities about "reducing barriers."

The means of solving the specific problem of OA is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate OA self-archiving ("Green OA") of peer-reviewed research journal articles:

"Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?"

And although there is a link between (1) research accessibility and (2) journal affordability, that link is indirect, and subtle, in the online age. It would be incorrect and simplistic to imagine that the research accessibility problem and the journal affordability problem (or their respective solutions) are one and the same. They are not.

Lynch: "There's been a lot of discussion about the desirability and potential implications of federal government mandates about deposit and access to the reports of findings of federally funded research. We should not forget that, even in disciplines where federal agencies are generous funders, a substantial part of the literature reports on the results of research that isn't federally funded."

That is why the discussion is about both funder mandates and institutional mandates: That covers all research output, funded and unfunded. (See Lynch's own Point 2.)

Lynch: "In my view, when we think about the fundamental integrity of the scholarly record available for open access via the Internet, we would be much better served if we can make the shift to open access at the level of entire journals or entire publisher journal portfolios rather than article by article."

100% OA would be welcome in any way it could be provided, whether Green OA, by self-archiving 100% of journal articles, or "Gold OA", by converting 100% of journals to OA publishing, and then publishing therein.

But most publishers are not converting to OA Gold publishing; and funders and institutions cannot mandate that they convert.

Moreover (as Cliff points out in two of his other, valid points below) there is the sticky question of the per-article asking price for OA Gold publishing, which is rather arbitrary at this time. Gold OA is not worth purchasing at any price -- in view of the fact that Green OA is available as an alternative, and can be mandated, and can drive the price of Gold OA down to the true cost of the essentials.

Hence there is no earthly reason to wait and hope for a direct transition to 100% OA via Gold OA, journal by journal. What needs to be OA is the articles, and those can and should and will be made 100% OA via institution/funder self-archiving mandates of exactly the kind that are increasingly being implemented and proposed today.

If there is to be Gold OA at all, then the road to Gold OA is via Green OA. But once we have mandated 100% Green OA, we already have 100% OA, so whether or not there is eventually a transition to Gold OA becomes supererogatory. Rather than speculating about this now, we should get on with doing the do-able task of mandating and providing Green OA.

Lynch: "We know from past experience that it's very difficult for many users of the scholarly record to understand what they are navigating and exploiting when there's only partial coverage. "

The remedy for that "partial coverage" is not to keep waiting for (and/or to pay the pre-emptive asking price of) journal-by-journal Gold OA, but to mandate Green OA right now, so we can reach 100% OA at long last.

Lynch: "Of course, if we can't persuade the journals and the publishers to support the move to open access, we'll have to go to less optimal approaches like author self-archiving and mandates by specific research funding agencies (both government and private)."

How much longer does Cliff propose that we keep waiting, trying to persuade journals and publishers to move? (We have already been waiting well over a decade now.)

And what determines whether the asking price is the right one (or the "more optimal" approach to 100% OA)?

Lynch: "it may well be that the threat of legislation mandating deposit of research results may be doing more good, in terms of advancing progress and focusing discussion on the issues with a certain sense of urgency, than actual legislation would. And while I'm not opposed to legislative intervention here, I'd hope that any legislation that is enacted is transparent and invisible to authors who publish with journals that appropriately support open access."

It is gratifying to hear that Cliff is not opposed to the OA mandates that have already been enacted and the others that are being planned, but the foregoing passage does sound a bit confusing, or confused: The mandates are to self-archive published articles (Green) not to publish in OA journals (Gold). The goal is to generate OA (Green), not to pressure publishers into converting to Gold.

If what Cliff means is that mandates should not constrain publishers' choice of journals, that makes sense; but journals need not even be mentioned in mandates: Only the requirement to deposit the final peer reviewed draft, as soon as it is accepted for publication, has to be mentioned. And if the mandates allow an embargo period at all (most OA advocates don't think they should, or need to, but if some funders are nevertheless bent upon allowing delays, as some appear to be), let the allowable embargo be minimal (6 months at most); and during the embargo period, while the deposit is in Closed Access rather than Open Access, all ongoing research access needs webwide can be fulfilled via each Institutional Repository's semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button, which can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA on an individual request basis. Such a an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate also moots any journal copyright policy issues that might have constrained the journal-choice of the author in complying with the mandate.

Lynch: "2. Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers"

Here Cliff is perhaps advocating mandated rights retention, which would not be a bad idea if such a mandate could be successfully adopted over author objections that it too could constrain their choice of journal!

And successful rights negotiation is not really necessary as a precondition for mandated self-archiving. Immediate deposit can be mandated without any reference to journal policy; 70% of journals already endorse immediate setting of access to Open Access. For the remaining 30%, access can be provisionally set to Closed Access and the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button can tide over usage needs during any embargo period. (Embargos will soon collapse under OA usage pressure in any case, as self-archiving grows.)

So the best thing universities can do for OA is not merely to throw their weight behind rights retention by their authors, but to mandate immediate deposit of all final drafts accepted for publication ("postprints"), thereby complementing the funder mandates.

Lynch: "My worst nightmare is that rights to the scholarly literature become so fragmented"

Practices should not be dictated by nightmares but by clear reasoning, in the light of day: Once the full-texts of all articles are self-archived and freely accessible online, all the uses Cliff envisages (automatic harvesting, data-mining, etc.) come with the (free, online) territory, inexorably. No need to keep them all in the same (Gold) journal or "portfolio" for that, nor to renegotiate rights. Just deposit all articles in OA Institutional Repositories, free for all.

And the PostGutenberg "glue" to keep a corpus from getting fragmented is metadata tags, not a shared spatial locus (nor the glue in the binding of a single shared journal locus).

Lynch: "Again, this connects to the theme of the overall integrity of the scholarly record, and our need to be able to manage this record at scale."

The scholarly record will now be distributed across a worldwide network of interoperable Institutional Repositories. Articles and data will be the principal items of interest; and the journal they were peer-reviewed and accepted by will simply be certified by one of their metadata tags (but a critically important tag).

Lynch: "3. We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies"

Here Cliff rightly calls into question whether the other "good works" of Scholarly Societies should continue to be subsidised by authors' lost research impact. The answer, of course, is No; and that will become clear to all once it is discussed openly.

But, again, what is at issue is not cajoling or coercing publishers -- whether Scholarly-Society, commercial or otherwise -- to convert to Gold. (It would be helpful if they endorsed immediate Green, but even that is only desirable, but not necessary in advance.) The issue is research institutions and funders mandating Green OA. Scholarly Societies simply risk baring their blatant conflict of interest with their own membership (researchers) if they venture to oppose mandating Green OA.

Lynch: "their journals typically are viewed as offering high quality at reasonable cost, and there's no reason that they shouldn't continue to be highly competitive if one moves away from a reader-pays model."

No special need to talk to Scholarly Societies if one is not proposing to "move away" from any model but merely mandating self-archiving (with or without publisher endorsement). (And, to repeat, OA is not solely, or primarily about OA Gold: it is about OA. No need to "move way from models": just to move fingers to keyboard so as to deposit articles...)

Lynch: "4. We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing"

This recommendation too, is far too focussed on OA Gold and its speculative economics, rather than just plain old vanilla OA.

What "we" need to do right now is to forget about affordability and to mandate OA self-archiving. And to move our fingers to the keyboard, to get going on the depositing...

Lynch: "One takes the operating budget or historic revenue stream of a given journal and divides by the number of articles published or submitted, and announces the per-published-article cost (or submitted-article-cost, if one uses that model) for an open access journal."

It is certainly true that this is an extremely arbitrary way of setting the asking price for OA Gold publishing. The only essential component of that current price is the cost of implementing peer review, which is somewhere between $50 and $500 per article.

But there is no earthly reason we should still be fussing about that now at all. It's already late in the day. Time to forget about Gold Fever and get the fingers moving, to provide immediate OA...

Lynch: "Perhaps the system needs to be redesigned to deliver a price point per article that we can afford. Suppose we redesigned journal publishing with the goal of $100 per article published?"

Pick your price, but this is all just notional designing of notional solutions in the skyways of speculation: Pre-emptive OA Gold.

The actual solution requires no guesstimating or publishing reform, voluntary or coerced, nor this interminable waiting and speculation: It just requires that researchers' institutions and funders mandate OA self-archiving, now.

(And who are "We"? We are the research community: We can mandate self-archiving by and for ourselves. We can move our fingers to provide the OA. But we can't redesign journal publishing. And we don't need to. That's not what OA is about. OA is about providing OA. Gold is just one possible way to provide OA, and it's proving to be an extremely slow and uncertain way, spending far more time contemplating hypothetical economics than providing actual OA. And it can't be mandated. Green, in contrast, can and does provide immediate OA, is already beginning to be mandated, and is only waiting for the mandating to propagate to all research institutions and funders in order to provide at last the 100% OA we have been wait for for so long. And the mandates are on the way. Because they come from Us, the research community, the providers and users of the articles that we are seeking to make OA. No need to "redesign" anything but our digital kinematics -- and I don't mean financial or even cybernetic digits, but the dactyls at the beck and call of every one of us...)

But Cliff is back again, at the financial digits:

Lynch: "Or, if articles really must cost several thousand dollars each, and we are unwilling to deal with the implications or results of massively reducing costs, we need to explore what can we do to reduce the number of articles going into this costly system."

By now, we have long forgotten the immediate, pressing, solvable problem, which is OA, and we have launched back into the usual round of passive armchair speculations about the journal affordability problem and publishing reform...

Lynch: "similar questions can and should be asked about monograph publishing"

Yes, but let those similar questions and answers be kept separate from the problem at hand, which is OA, i.e., in the first instance, Open Access to the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer reviewed journals, every single one of which is and always has been an author give-away, written solely for the sake of usage and impact, not for the sake of earning royalty revenue. Not necessarily true of all monographs (though it might be true of some).

First things first. Let's require and reach 100% OA for OA's primary target, journal articles, and then contemplate the generalizability of our fabulous success to other forms of literature.

In the meantime, no one is stopping monograph authors (or their fingers) from making their books OA too, if they so wish, and if their publishers can afford to publish them anyway. But let us not contemplate mandating that sort of thing just yet!

Lynch: "5. Open Access Is Not a Threat to Peer Review: In Fact, It Has Nothing to Do with Peer Review -- but It Is Also Time to Talk about Peer Review"

Yes, it is not a threat. Yes, it has nothing to do with it. And no, OA is not the context to talk about peer review. (If this is the time, then it should be talked about separately, elsewhere; nothing to do with OA.)

Lynch: "The economic model underlying a journal has nothing to do with its peer review policy -- or its quality. There are many online journals that practice rigorous peer review. Indeed, going beyond just peer review, there seems to be no correlation between journal cost and quality."

These truisms are worth repeating, since so many still fail to grasp them.

But Cliff raises them misleadingly: OA is not the same thing as Gold OA. The peer-review issue is not just raised as a question about the quality standards of Gold OA journals. It is also raised by some publishers who keep proclaiming willy-nilly the doomsday scenario that mandating Green OA self-archiving will destroy journals and peer review. That is the empty alarmism that needs to be exposed for what it really is:

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Lynch: "At the same time -- and having just emphasized the complete disconnect between open access and peer review, I almost hate to mention this for fear of adding to the confusion -- we are long overdue for a nuanced analysis and reevaluation of peer review practices in scholarly publishing as an entirely separate issue from open access."

Don't mention it! (In this context.)

It is indeed irrelevant to OA and only adds confusion to confusion, and delay and indecision to what has already been near-paralysis for far too long...

Lynch: "We need to understand the extent of these costs and their implications."

The costs of peer review alone can be vaguely estimated now, and have been. But the only way to determine the true costs of peer review alone (once all other obsolescent publishing functions have been jettisoned [like print] or offloaded [like online access-provision and archiving] onto the distributed network of OA IRs) is to mandate Green and then let nature take its course in the online era.

(Don't ask me why nature couldn't take its course without the help of mandates, when 34,000 researchers happily perform the requisite keystrokes to sign a threat to boycott their journals if they do not provide OA, but it never occurs to them to go ahead and do the keystrokes to provide the OA for themselves! Or when university provosts perform the keystrokes in droves to sign in support of a federal federal proposal to mandate the keystrokes of self-archiving, but it never occurs to them to adopt a keystroke mandate at their own local institutions already, instead of sitting on their hands waiting for the federal mandate! I don't know the answer. It's a paradox, a koan, and I've dubbed it Zeno's Paralysis. But the affliction is curable, by mandates, freely applied to the research community's body politick.)

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.

Lynch: "6. Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity."

By all means, let those who wish to reform the scholarly publishing system so as to better serve the academy so declare their intentions and proceed full-speed with their worthy agenda.

But let those who merely wish to maximise online access to a very specific subset of scholarly publications (peer-reviewed research articles), right now, proceed toward their specific, distinct, immediately reachable and already woefully overdue goal (OA) without being hamstrung by any other admirable but irrelevant agendas.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: There is undeniably a conflict of interest today between what is best for both the research community and the public that funds it, on the one hand, and what is best for the publishing community, on the other. Nor is there any doubt about how this conflict of interest can and will be resolved: Open Access. The only thing at issue is how long the optimal and inevitable can and will be delayed, and how to reach it as soon as possible.

---

In "More misinformation on repositories from ALPSP" Steve Hitchcock wrote:

['Romeo Green' publisher] policies [endorsing author self-archiving] have benefitted both publishers and repositories. [They] would not have been voluntarily adopted by publishers otherwise.'

Not quite: Many of the 94% of journals that are Romeo green (e.g., the APS and IOPP journals) became green because of Open Access (OA) self-archiving's demonstrated benefits to research, researchers and the public that funds them (doubled research usage and impact), not because self-archiving also enhances journal visibility and impact factors, hence might benefit journal sales or submissions. Let us not forget that although the PLoS petition, which threatened to boycott journals that did not provide OA, failed (because publishers were understandably unwilling to convert to an untested publishing model), the will of its 34,000 signatories was nevertheless noted, and green self-archiving policies were partly the result.

The will of the research community is still being (understandably) monitored by the publishing community. It is being noted that only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously, despite its demonstrated benefits. Research funders and institutions are now proposing to mandate self-archiving (just as they already mandate publishing itself), in order to maximize the benefits to researchers, their institutions, and the funding public. Publishers are trying to oppose those mandates, but again, there is ultimately no choice but to adapt to the will and interests of the research community (which includes researchers' employers and funders).

The problem is that publishers are also trying (rather ineptly) to manipulate that will, by misrepresenting the research community's interests, and that effort is bound to backfire sooner or later, to publishers' historic discredit. It is not only natural for the research community to 'put the interests of [its own] institution[s] and local community' first' but it is also in the interests of research productivity and progress, and the tax-paying public that funds them. Publishers would accordingly be far better advised to allow nature to take its course, toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, researchers and the public, and to prepare to adapt to it, rather than just trying to delay and waylay it. There is absolutely no doubt about which way any conflict of interest here (between the research community and the public on the one hand, and the publishing community on the other) will need to be resolved.

Best not to argue with the optimal and inevitable...

"Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society)"
"Evolving Publisher Copyright Policies On Self-Archiving" (2002)
"Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving" (2004)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

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Gunther Eysenbach (GE) (in a letter in letter PLoS Biology today) wrote:

GE: "The introduction of the article and two accompanying editorials [1, 2, 3] already answer Harnad's questions why author, editors, and reviewers were critical of the methodology employed in previous studies, which all only looked at "green OA" (self-archived/online-accessible papers)"

I didn't ask why the author and editors were critical of prior self-archiving (green OA) studies; I asked why they said such studies were "surprisingly hard to find" and why the two biggest and latest of them were not even taken into account:

Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 56.

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.

And the reason all prior within-journal studies look only at "green OA" is that the majority of OA today is green; hence almost all OA/NOA impact comparisons are based on green OA (self-archiving) rather than on paid-OA (gold). To compare OA and NOA between rather than within journals would be to compare apples and oranges: See critique of ISI's between-journal OA/NOA comparisons in:

Brody, T. and Harnad, S. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals. D-Lib Magazine 10(6).

GE: " (hint 1: "confounding") (hint 2: arrow of causation: are papers online because they are highly cited, or the other way round?)."

I am afraid I don't see Eysenbach's point here at all: What exactly does he think is being confounded in within-journal comparisons of self-archived versus non-self-archived articles? The paid-OA effect? But among OA articles today there is almost zero within-journal paid-OA, because so few journals offer it! (Hajjem et al.'s within-journal comparisons were based on over a million articles, across 12 years and hundreds of journals, in 12 disciplines! Eysenbach's were based on 1492 articles, in 6 months, in one journal.)

And is Eysenbach suggesting that his failure to find any significant difference among author self-reports -- about their own article's quality and its causal role in their decision about whether or not to pay for OA (or to self-archive) in his sample of 237 authors -- is an objective test of the arrow of causation? (I agree that Eysenbach's failure to find a difference fails to support the hypothesis of a self-selection bias, but surely that won't convince those who are minded to hold that hypothesis! I would welcome rigorous causal evidence against the self-selection hypothesis as much as Eysenbach would, but author self-reports are alas not that evidence!)

GE: " The statement in the PLoS editorial has to be seen against this background. None of the previous papers in the bibliography mentioned by Harnad employed a similar methodology, working with data from a "gold-OA" journal."

Yes, almost all prior studies on the OA impact advantage are based on green OA, not gold, but so what? It is Eysenbach (and PLoS) who are focussed on gold-OA journals; the rest of the studies are focussed on OA itself. Only about 10% of the planet's peer-reviewed journals are gold today, and most of those are 100% gold, hence allow no within-journal comparisons. Very few journals as yet offer authors the "Open Choice" (optional paid gold) that would allow gold within-journal OA/NOA comparisons; and few authors are as yet taking those journals up on it (about 15% in this PNAS sample), compared to the far larger number that are self-archiving (also 15%, as it happens, though that percentage too is still far too small!). The difference in article sample sizes is about four orders of magnitude (c. 1500 articles in Eysenbach's study to 1.5 million in Hajjem et al's).

GE: " The correct method to control for problem 1 (multiple confounders) is multivariate regression analysis, not used in previous studies."

Correct. But with the large, consistent within-journal OA/NOA differences found across al journals, all disciplines and all years in samples four orders of magnitude larger than Eysenbach's, it is not at all clear that controls for those "multiple confounders" are necessary in order to demonstrate the reality, magnitude and universality of the OA advantage. That does not mean the controls are not useful, just that they are not yet telling us much that we don't already know.

GE: " Harnad's statement that "many [of the confounding variables] are peculiar to this particular... study" suggests that he might still not fully appreciate the issue of confounding. Does he suggest that in his samples there are no differences in these variables (for example, number of authors) between the groups? Did he even test for these? If he did, why was this not described in these previous studies?"

No, we did not test for "confounding effects" of number of authors: What confounding effects does Eysenbach expect from controlling for number of authors in a sample of over a million articles across a dozen disciplines and a dozen years all showing the very same, sizeable OA advantage? Does he seriously think that partialling out the variance in the number of authors would make a dent in that huge, consistent effect?

Not that Eysenbach's tentative findings on 1st-author/last-author differences in his one-journal sample of 1492 are not interesting; but those are merely minor differences in shading, compared to the whopping main effect, which is: substantially more citations (and downloads) for self-archived OA articles.

GE: " The correct method to address problem 2 (the "arrow of causation" problem) is to do a longitudinal (cohort) study, as opposed to a cross-sectional study. This ascertains that OA comes first and THEN the paper is cited highly, while previous cross-sectional studies in the area of "green OA" publishing (self-archiving) leave open what comes first -- impact or being online."

I agree completely that time-based studies are necessary to demonstrate causation, for those who think that the OA advantage might be based on self-selection bias (i.e., that high-impact studies tend to be preferentially self-archived, perhaps even after they have gained their high impact), but Eysenbach's author self-report data certainly don't constitute such a longtitudinal cohort study! (Once there exist reliable deposit dates for self-archived articles, we will be able to do some time-based analyses on green OA too, but, frankly, by that time the outcome is likely to be a foregone conclusion.)

In the meanwhile, the fact that (a) the OA advantage does not diminish for younger articles (as one would expect if it were a post-hoc effect), that (b) OA increases downloads, and that (c) increased downloads in the first 6 months are correlated with increased citations later on -- plus the logic of the fact that (d) unaffordability reduces access and that (e) access is a necessary condition for citation -- all suggest that most of the scepticism about the SOA advantage is because of conflicting interests, not because of objective uncertainty.

GE: " Harnad - who usually carefully distinguishes between "green" and "gold" OA publishing -- ignores that open access is a continuum, much as publishing is a continuum"

I'm afraid I have no idea what Eysenbach means about OA being a continuum: Time is certainly a continuum, and access certainly admits of degrees (access may be easier/harder, narrower/wider, cheaper/dearer, longer/shorter, earlier/later, partial/full) -- but Open Access does not admit of degrees (any more than pregnancy does). OA means immediate, permanent, full-text online access, free for all, now.

And, by the way, green OA is certainly not a lesser degree of gold OA!

For the innocent reader, puzzled as to why this would even be an issue:

Please recall that OA (gold) journals, whether total or optional gold, need authors (and those gold journals with the gold cost-recovery model need paying author/institutions). To attract authors, gold journals need to persuade them of the benefits of OA. So far so good. But there is another thing they have to persuade them of, implicitly or explicitly, and that is the benefits of gold OA over green OA. For if there are no benefits of gold over green, then surely it makes much more sense for authors to publish in their journal of choice, as they always did, and simply self-archive their own articles, rather than switching journals and/or paying for gold OA!

This theme alas keeps recurring, implicitly or explicitly, in the internecine green/gold squabbles, because green OA is indeed a rival to gold OA in gold OA journals' efforts to win over authors. This is regrettable, but a functional fact today, owing to the nature of OA and of the two means of providing it.

Is the effect symmetrical? Is gold OA likewise a rival to green OA? Here the answer is more complicated: No, an author who chooses gold OA (by publishing in an OA journal) is not at all a loss for green OA, because the article is nevertheless OA, and green OA's sole objective is 100% OA, as soon as possible, and nothing else. (Besides, a gold OA article too can be self-archived in the author's Institutional Repository if the author or institution wishes! All gold journals are, a fortiori, also green, in that they endorse author self-archiving.)

But there is a potential problem with gold from the standpoint of green. The problem is not with authors choosing gold. The problem is with gold publishers promoting gold as superior to green, or, worse, with gold publishers implying that green OA is not really OA, or not "fully" OA (along some imaginary OA "continuum").

"Free Access vs. Open Access" (thread started Aug 2003)

Why, you ask, would gold OA want to give the impression that green OA was not "really" OA or not "fully" OA? Because of the rivalry for authors that I just mentioned. The causal arrow is a one-way one insofar as competition for authors is concerned: green OA does not lose an author if that author publishes in a gold OA journal, whereas gold OA does lose an author if an author publishes in a green journal instead of a gold one. However, if gold portrays green as if it were not really or fully OA, and authors believe this, then it loses author momentum for green -- especially among that vast majority of authors who do not yet elect to publish gold. For there is today something still very paradoxical, indeed equivocal, about author behavior and motivation vis-a-vis OA:

Authors profess to want OA. Thirty-four thousand of them even signed the 2001 PLoS Open Letter threatening to boycott their journals if they did not provide (gold) OA (within 6 months of publication). (Most journals did not comply, and most authors did not follow through on their boycott threat: How could they? There were not enough suitable gold journals for them to switch to, and most authors clearly were not interested in switching journals, let alone paying for publication, then or now.)

Yet (and here comes the paradox): if those 34,000 signatories -- allegedly so desirous of OA as to be ready to boycott their journals if they did not provide it -- had simply gone on to self-archive all their papers, they would be well on the road to having the OA they allegedly desired so much! For the green road to 100% OA happens to be based on the (golden!) rule: Self-Archive Unto Others As You Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You.

Why didn't (and don't) most authors do it (yet)? It is partly (let us state it quite frankly) straightforward foolishness and inconsistency on authors' part. They simply have not thought it through. This cannot be denied. Authors are in a state of self-induced "Zeno's Paralysis" regarding OA, from which FAQs have so far been powerless to free them -- so that it now looks as if self-archiving mandates from their institutions and/or their funders will be the only thing that can induce them to do what will give them what they so want and need.

But the confusion and inaction are partly also the fault of the promotional efforts of (well-meaning) OA advocates. Harold Varmus sent a mixed message with his 1999 "E-biomed" proposal (which led to PLoS, the PLoS Open letter, PubMed Central, Biomed Central, and eventually the PLoS and BMC fleet of OA journals, including PLoS Biology). Was E-biomed a gold proposal, a green proposal, both, or neither? The fact is that it was an incoherent proposal -- a confused and confusing mish-mash of central self-archiving, publishing reform/replacement and rival publishing -- and although it has undeniably led to genuine and valuable progress toward (what was eventually baptized by BOAI as) OA, it has left a continuing legacy of continuing confusion too.

And we are facing part of that legacy of confusion now, with PLoS thinking that the only way (or the best) to reach 100% OA is to publish and promote gold OA journals. That is why PLoS Biology agreed to referee the Eysenbach paper, which seemed to show that OA gold is the only one that increases citation impact, not green self-archiving, which is (when you come right down to it) not even "real" OA at all!

That is also why PLoS Biology editorialised that they found it "surprisingly hard to find" evidence -- "solid evidence" -- that OA articles are read and cited more. And that is why PLoS Biology was happy to make an exception and publish the Eysenbach study, even though scientometrics is not the subject matter of PLoS Biology, but (I'll warrant) PLoS Biology would not have been happy to advertise in its pages the fact that green OA self-archiving was enough to get articles read and cited more!

So green OA does have a bit of an uphill battle against gold OA and the subsidies and support it has received (because gold OA is an attractive and understandable idea, whereas green OA requires a few more mental steps to dope out -- though not many, as none of this is rocket science!).

But, to switch metaphors, the green road to 100% OA (sic) is far wider, faster and surer than the golden road. (Every article can be self-archived, today, and without their authors' having to renounce or switch journals, whereas most articles do not yet have a suitable OA journal to publish in today, even if their authors wished to switch journals, which most do not; and authors can be mandated to self-archive by their institutions and funders, but neither authors' choice of journals nor their publishers' choice of access-provision or cost-recovery model can be mandated by authors' institutions and funders.) Moreover, 100% OA really is beneficial to research and researchers; so the green road of self-archiving is bound to prevail, despite the extra obstacles. And the destination (100% OA) is exactly the same for both roads. (Indeed, I am pretty sure that even the fastest way to reach 100% gold OA -- i.e., not just 100% OA but also the conversion of all journals to gold -- is in fact to take the green road to 100% OA first.

So gold is doing itself a disservice when it tries to devalue green. Read on:

GE: " and this study (and the priority claims in the editorial) was talking about the gold OA end of the spectrum."

Spectrum? Continuum? Degrees of OA?

GE: " Publishing in an open access journal is a fundamentally different process from putting a paper published in a toll-access journal on the Internet. In analogy, printing something on a flyer and handing it out to pedestrians on the street, and publishing an article in a national newspaper can both be called "publishing", but they remain fundamentally different processes, with differences in impact, reach, etc. A study looking at the impact of publishing a newspaper can not be replaced with a study looking at the impact of handing out a flyer to pedestrians, even though both are about "publishing"."

Oh dear! I have a feeling Eysenbach is going to tell as that making a published journal article accessible online free for all by self-archiving it is not OA after all, or not "full OA". If the journal doesn't do it for you, and/or you don't pay for it, it's not the real thing.

I wonder why Eysenbach would want to say that? Could it be because he is promoting an OA (gold) journal (his own)? Could that also have been the reason the PLoS editorial was so sanguine about Eysenbach's findings on the OA gold advantage, and so dismissive of any prior evidence of an OA green advantage?

GE: " Finally, Harnad says that "prior evidence derived from substantially larger and broader-based samples showing substantially the same outcome". I rebut with two points here[:] Regarding "larger samples" I think rigor and quality (leading to internal validity) is more important than quantity (or sample size)."

Even when all within-journal studies -- large and small, approximate and exact -- just keep producing exactly the same outcome, every time (OA increases impact)?

GE: " Going through the laborious effort to extract article and author characteristics for a limited number of articles (n = 1492) in order to control for these confounders provides scientifically stronger evidence than doing a crude, unadjusted analysis of a huge number of online accessible vs non-online accessible articles, leaving open many alternative explanations."

As I said, for those who doubt the causality and think the OA advantage is just a self-selection bias, Eysenbach's study will not convince them otherwise either. For those with eyes to see, the repeated demonstrations, in field after field, of exactly the same effect on incomparably larger samples will already have been demonstration enough. For those with eyes only for gold, evidence that green enhances citations will never be "solid evidence."

If Eysenbach and the editors had portrayed the latest PLoS findings as they should have, namely, as yet another confirmation of the OA impact advantage, with some new details about its fine-tuning, I would have done had nothing but praise for it. But the actual self-interested spin and puffery that instead accompanied this work -- propagating the frankly false idea that this is the first "solid evidence" for the OA impact advantage, and, worse, that it implies that self-archiving itself does not deliver the OA impact advantage -- would have required not the lack of an ego, but the lack of any real fealty to OA itself to have been allowed to stand uncontested.

GE: " Secondly, contrary to what Harnad said, this study is NOT at all "showing substantially the same outcome". On the contrary, the effect of green-OA -- once controlled for confounders - was much less than what others have claimed in previous papers."

Let's be quite explicit about what, exactly, we are discussing here:

Eysenbach found that in a 6-month sample of 1492 articles in one 3-option journal (PNAS):

"While in the crude analysis self-archived papers had on average significantly more citations than non-self-archived papers (mean, 5.46 versus 4.66; Wilcoxon Z = 2.417; p = 0.02), these differences disappeared when stratified for journal OA status (p= 0.10 in the group of articles published originally as non-OA articles, and p = 0.25 in the group of articles published originally as OA).

"In a logistic regression model with backward elimination, which included original OA status and self-archiving OA status as separate independent variables as well as all potential confounders, self-archiving OA status did not remain a significant predictor for being cited. In a linear regression model, the influence of the covariate "article published originally as OA, without being self-archived" (beta = 0.250, p < 0.001) on citations remained stronger than self-archiving status (beta = 0.152, p = 0.02)."

To translate this into english (from an article with exceedingly user-unfriendly data-displays, by the way, making it next to impossible to extract and visualize results from the tables by inspection!): First, the numbers:

NOA (Not OA): (1159 articles 86.2% cited at least once)
POA (Payed OA only): (176 articles 94.3% cited at least once)
SOA (Self-Archived OA only): (121 articles 90.1% cited at least once)
BOA (POA and SOA): ( 36 articles 97.2% cited at least once)

The finding is that (in this PNAS sample, and with many other factors -- e.g., days since publication, number of authors, article type, country, funding, subject, etc. -- statistically isolated so as to be asessable independently): POA, SOA and BOA considered together, and PAO considered alone, all have significantly more citations than NOA; but SOA considered alone ("stratified") does not. Also, if considered jointly (multiple regression), both POA and SOA increase citations, but POA is the stronger effect.

Here are three simple hypotheses, in decreasing order of likelihood, as to why this small PNAS study may have found that the citation counts and their significance ordered themselves as they did: BOA>POA>>SOA>NOA

Hypothesis 1: The POA advantage might be unique to high-profile 3-option journals (POA, SOA, NOA) like PNAS (which are themselves a tiny minority among journals) and occurs because the POA articles are more visible than the SOA articles. (The POA + SOA = BOA articles do the best of all: redundancy enhances visibility.) So the POA authors do get something more for their money (but that something is not OA but high-profile POA in a high-profile journal) -- at least for the time being. This extra POA-over-SOA advantage will of course wash out as SOA and indexed, interoperable Institutional Repositories for self-archiving grow.

Hypothesis 2: The POA advantage might result at least in part from QB (self-selection Quality Bias) because the decision (by a self-selected 15% subset of PNAS authors) to pay for POA is influenced by the author's underlying sense of the potential importance (hence impact) of his article: Simply asking authors about how important they think their article is, and whether that influenced their decision to pick POA or SOA or NOA, and failing to detect any significant difference among the authors, does not settle this matter, and certainly not on the basis of such a small and special sample. (But I think QB is just one of many contributors to the OA citation advantage itself, and certainly not the only determinant or even the biggest one.)

Hypothesis 3: The POA advantage might be either a small-sample chance result or a temporary side-effect of the 3-option journals in early days: a one-stop shopping advantage for PNAS articles, in a high-profile store, today. It needs to be tested for replicability and representativeness in larger samples of articles, journals, and time-bases.

(Note that Lawrence's 2001 as well as Hajjem et al's 2005 finding had been that the proportion of OA articles increases in the higher citation ranges, being lowest among articles with 0-1 citations.)

Eysenbach finds that with logistic regression analysis separating the independent effects of POA, SOA and other correlates, SOA has no significant independent effect in his 1-year PNAS sample. Now let's test whether that replicates in larger samples, both in terms of number of articles, journals, and time-base. (Failure to find a significant effect in a small sample is far less compelling than success in finding a significant effect in a small sample!)

GE: " Harnad, a self-confessed "archivangalist", co-creator of a self-archiving platform, and an outspoken advocate of self-archiving (speaking of vested interests) calls the finding that self-archived articles are... cited less often than [gold] OA articles from the same journal "controversial". In my mind, the finding that the impact of nonOA < greenOA < goldOA < green+goldOA is intuitive and logical: The level of citations correlates with the level of openness and accessibility."

I don't dispute that POA can add more citations, just as BOA can; maybe self-archiving in 10 different places will add still more. But what does this imply, right now, practically speaking? And, even more important, how likely is it that this sort of redundancy will continue to confer significant citation advantages once a critical mass of the literature is in interoperable Institutional Repositories (green SOA) rather than few and far between, as now? It is indeed intuitive and logical that the baseline 15% of the literature as a whole that is being spontaneously self-archived somewhere, somehow on the Web, across all fields, has somewhat less visibility right now than the 15% of PNAS articles that PNAS is making OA for those authors who pay for it (POA). That's a one-stop shopping advantage for PNAS articles, against PNAS articles, in a high-profile store, today.

But the true measure of the SOA advantage today (at its 15% spontaneous baseline) is surely not to be found in PNAS but in the statistically far more numerous, hence far more representative full-spectrum of journals that do not yet offer POA. (I would be delighted if those journals took the Eysenbach findings as a reason for offering a POA option! But not at the expense of authors drawing the absurd conclusion -- not at all entailed by Eysenbach's PNAS-specific results -- that in the journals they currently publish in, SOA alone would not confer citation advantages at least as big as the ones we have been reporting.)

Regarding my self-confessed sin of archivanglizing, however, I do protest that my first and only allegiance is to 100% OA, and I evangelize the green road (and promote the self-archiving software) only because it is so resoundingly obvious that it is the fastest and surest road to 100% OA. (If empirical -- or logical -- evidence were ever to come out showing the contrary, I assure you I too would join the gold rush!)

GE: " Sometimes our egos stand in the way of reaching a larger common goal, and I hope Harnad and other sceptics respond with good science rather than with polemics and politics to these findings."

Well, first, let us not get carried away: There's precious little science involved here (apart from the science we are trying to provide Open Access to). The call to self-archive in order to enhance access and impact is so obvious and trivial that, as I noted, the puzzle is only why anyone would even have imagined otherwise.

But when it comes to polemics and politics (and possibly also egos), it might have kept things more objective if the results of Eysenbach's small but welcome study confirming the OA impact advantage had not been hyped with editorial salvos such as:

"solid evidence to support or refute... that papers freely available in a journal will be more often read and cited than those behind a subscription barrier... has been surprisingly hard to find..."

Or even the heavily-hedged:

"As far as we are aware, no other study has compared OA and non-OA articles from the same journal and controlled for so many potentially confounding factors."

GE: " Unfortunately, in this area a lot more people have strong opinions and beliefs than those having the skills, time, and willingness to do rigorous research. I hope we will change this, and I reiterate a "call for papers" in that area [http://www.jmir.org/2006/2/e8/]"

May I echo that call, adding only that the rigorous research might perhaps be better placed in a journal specializing in scientometrics and in rigorously peer-reviewing it, rather than in The Journal of Medical Internet Research, or even PLoS Biology.

Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 56.

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.

I close with some replies to portions of another version of Eysenbach's response which appeared in his blog.

GE: " Harnad's point that the PLoS paper is about the "citation advantage of open access" and that there have been "previous papers about the citation advantage of open access" (mostly his own studies, mostly not published in peer-reviewed journals) is as meaningful as saying "this paper is about a cancer treatment, and there are previous papers about cancer treatments, so this one doesn't add anything"."

That's not what I said. I said this:

"[T]he only new knowledge from this small, journal-specific sample was (1) the welcome finding of how early the OA advantage can manifest itself, plus (2) some less clear findings about differences between first- and last-author OA practices, plus (3) a controversial finding that will most definitely need to be replicated on far larger samples in order to be credible: "The analysis revealed that self-archived articles are also cited less often than OA [sic] articles from the same journal."

And I do think all of this is as far away from rigorous oncological research as it is from rocket science!

GE: " The statement made by the reviewers and editors of the PLoS paper that this is the first study looking at the citation advantage of an open access/hybrid journal remains correct until somebody can show me a reference where this has been done before."

But who ever contested that far more modest and circumspect statement (which was certainly not the one the accompanying PLoS editorial made)? This is indeed "the first study looking at the citation advantage of an open access/hybrid journal"; indeed, it's the first such study of PNAS. But it's certainly not the first study looking at the citation advantage of OA in general, or OA self-archiving in particular, and looking at it within journals -- within many journals, and many articles.

GE: " In analogy, a small carefully designed cohort study showing a relationship between smoking and cancer with 1500 patients, obtaining through questionnaires and interviews additional variables which could account for the association and controlling for these confounders and still coming to the conclusion that there is a relation between smoking and cancer is scientifically stronger evidence than a quick-and-dirty uncontrolled cross-sectional study showing an association between smoking and cancer, even if this is done in a population of millions."

Indeed it would. And I forgot to add to my list (4) that Eysenbach had tested the hypothesis that the OA citation advantage is merely the result of a self-selection bias by asking 247 authors whether it was, and they replied that it wasn't...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

[This is an updated version of a posting to the American Scientist Open Access Forum on Tuesday, 14 October 2003.]

When Harold Varmus's very timely and influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal (a pot-pourri of ideas about publishing, journals, archiving, peer-review, and what would eventually come to be called "Open Access [OA]") elicited staunch opposition from its foes and constructive criticism from its friends -- but very little in the way of OA -- it led to the creation of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), whose first action was to launch an Open Letter, signed by 34,000 biologists worldwide, threatening to boycott their journals if they did not make their contents OA (within 6 months of publication).

Now SUPPOSE that -- in addition to performing the keystrokes required to sign the 2001 PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott journals unless they become OA journals), each of the 34,000 PLoS signatories had also performed (or deputized a librarian, secretary or student to perform for them) the few further keystrokes it would have required to make just one of their own year-2001 articles OA by self-archiving it, free for all, on the web.

THEN the number of OA articles (34,000) resulting from just that minimal act would already have doubled (to 60%) the percentage of OA articles (34%) among the approximately 55,000 Biology articles indexed by ISI in 2001; it would also have exceeded the total number of articles published by both BioMed Central and PLoS journals from 2001 to the present (c. 20,000)

And all at the cost of only a few keystrokes more per article than what it cost to sign the PLoS petition.

Yet the only thing researchers did in 2001 was to sign the PLoS Open Letter demanding that their journals give them OA. They then waited, passively, for the journals to comply with their demand for OA. [Most journals did not comply directly; of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals that exist in 2005, only about 1700 of them (7%) have converted to (or already were) OA ("gold") journals; however, since 2001 over 90% of journals have also gone on to give author self-archiving their "green light" in response to researchers' expressed wish for OA.] Yet today most researchers still seem ready to keep on waiting, passively, for more OA journals to be created or converted, one by one. Meanwhile spontaneous self-archiving continues to hover at between 5-25%, depending on the field and year.

Is there not a note of inconsistency in this? Researchers feel they need and want OA enough to demand it from their journals, even threatening (rather idly, as it turns out to have been a bluff) to stop submitting to and peer-reviewing for the journals that decline to give them the OA they need and want so much. The benefits of OA are clearly demonstrated by the objective evidence for the dramatic citation impact advantage provided by OA, so the needing and wanting have an unassailable objective basis: But do they have an equally unassailable subjective basis, if the needing and wanting are not sufficient to induce researchers to perform (or commission) for themselves the few keystrokes that are the only thing standing between them and 100% OA?

Researchers themselves have hinted at the resolution to this koan: Yes, they need and want OA. But there are many other demands on their time too, and they will only perform the requisite keystrokes if their employers and/or funders require them to do it, just as it is already their employers and funders who require them to do the keystrokes to publish (or perish) in the first place. It is employers and funders who set researchers' priorities, because it is employers and funders who reward researchers' performance. Today, about 15% of research is self-archived spontaneously but 95% of researchers sampled report that they would self-archive if required to do so by their employers and/or funders: 81% of them willingly, 14% reluctantly; only 5% would not comply with the requirement. And in the two objective tests to date of this self-reported prediction, both have fully confirmed it, with over 90% self-archiving in the two cases where it was made a requirement (Southampton-ECS and CERN).

So an employer/funder self-archiving mandate is obviously what is missing to resolve the koan. But what exactly needs to be mandated? Only the keystrokes for depositing the final draft plus the OAI metadata of the article in the author's Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication, along with the strong encouragement to set access-privileges as "OA" (full-text access open webwide). Access to over 90% of these articles can already be set as OA with the blessing of their publishers. The rest can be set to IR-internal access (for institutional employees, employers and funders) for the time being, but their metadata (author, title, journal, date, abstract, keywords) will still be as visible to all searchers and surfers webwide as those of the 90% that are already OA, allowing would-be users to email the author to request an eprint. Emailing eprints can bridge the gap until either the remaining 10% of journals give self-archiving their blessing or the author tires of doing the superfluous keystrokes to email the eprints and simply does the last keystroke to set access at OA. Either way, mediated OA will already be providing effective 100% OA as of the implementation of the keystroke-policy.

Such an immediate-deposit ("keystroke") policy -- leaving no loopholes for any exceptions or delays -- is what Research Councils UK (RCUK) needs to mandate. The rest of the planet will follow suit. And Nature will take care of the rest.

Stevan Harnad

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" Why price boycott is the wrong strategy" -- (Feb. 2000)
" Petitions, Boycotts, and Liberating the Refereed Literature Online" -- (Oct 2000)