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Wednesday, June 15. 2011SPARC Europe's OA Suggestions to EC: Part Sense, Part Nonsense, Part IrrelevanceSPARC Europe's OA suggestions to the EC are part sense, part nonsense, part irrelevance:SUMMARY: Calling for Green Gratis OA Mandates makes sense. Calling for Libre OA, extra Gold OA funds, or double-standards for journal quality does not. Call for the reasonable. Grasp the reachable. And trust nature to take care of the rest. Sense: - Open Access means immediate access, without delaying mechanisms[assuming that what is meant here is to extend the EC Green OA self-archiving mandates] Nonsense: - Open Access in Institutional Open Access Policies should refer to “Libre” Open Access: free to access and free to re-use[Libre OA asks for much more than Gratis OA (free online access) and we are nowhere near having Gratis OA yet. It is counter-productive to over-reach and ask for more when you don't even have the less. Mandating Green Gratis OA will eventually lead to Libre OA too, but demanding Libre OA now will lead nowhere for many more years to come.] - communicate that the quality of Open Access peer-reviewed journals is equal to the quality of subscription peer-reviewed journals[Utter, utter nonsense, parroted year in and year out by an endless succession of well-meaning know-naughts: The quality of a peer-reviewed journal is what it is, regardless of its cost-recovery model. Is the EC supposed to give a-priori quality bonuses to journals, based on whether or not they happen to be OA, rather than letting them earn it, with their peer-review standards and quality track-records, like all other journals?] - call for subscription-based publishers to allow authors and institutions to deposit metadata into Open Access repositories and to support Creative Commons licensing of these materials[Why call for this, since authors can already deposit their metadata? What publishers should be called upon to do is simply to endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, as over 60% of journals already do ("being on the side of the angels"] Irrelevance: - make funding available to cover the costs of Open Access publishing[Does the EC have spare funds for this? What is needed is OA, not more money to pay publishers. Institutional subscriptions are paying for publication already. What is needed is to mandate Green Gratis OA self-archiving. If and when funds are needed to pay for Gold OA publishing, they will come from the release of the institutional subscription funds through cancelation.] - call for subscription-based publishers to start the transition of subscription journals towards Open Access["Calling on publishers to start the transition" will have no effect and is hence irrelevant. Mandating Green OA, in contrast, will generate OA, and then the publishers will start planning for a transition of their own accord as a natural matter of course if and when mandated Green OA begins causing cancelation pressure.] - provide an infrastructure enabling publisher content to be harvested and deposited into institutional repositories[What is needed is not an infrastructure. What is needed is a mandate to deposit.] Stevan Harnad Enabling Open Scholarship Wednesday, February 23. 2011Quod Erat ad Demonstrandum (QED)
[Note: This is a response to an anonymous posting to the ScienceInsider discussion forum. In Hungary, left-liberal critics are being systematically harassed in a smear campaign abetted by the Hungarian right-wing government. The ScienceInsider forum was intended to bring these tactics out into the open. Here is an instance where an anonymous poster tried such a smear tactic against me, suggesting that the reason I launched the Open Letter and campaign in support of the accused philosophers was for self-promotion, citing data on self-edits on my Wikipedia entry by way of incriminating evidence.]
I first posted the following to ScienceInsider, explaining why my reply would appear here rather than there: For the reasons already stated in the Anonymity FAQ, I won't respond on Science Insider to Anonymous's enterprising attempt to put a sinister spin on trivial Wikipedia data. But for those for whom the nonsense (and mischief) is not already transparent, I have responded openly on Open Access Archivangelism.1. Most Wikipedia authors and editors are anonymous, or, rather, pseudonymous. My decision to use my real name as my Wikipedia login -- the one that permitted "Anonymous" to make his shocking discovery -- is, as far as I know, relatively rare on Wikipedia. I did it very deliberately from the outset in 2005, because (for many reasons) I am opposed to anonymous, unanswerable Wikipedia puttering. 2. As far as I know, most contemporary academics who have a Wikipedia page either manage their own page or have their students do it. But few use their own names as their Wikipedia logins. 3. Hence it would have been impossible for Anonymous to make any objective comparisons between the number of self-edits I make on my own entry and the number of self-edits other authors make on their own entries. His data are hence just empty numerology -- all the moreso since my Wikipedia entry is relatively tiny, and the 43 corrections and updates I've done since 2005 have been tinier still. (E.g., I today removed -- for the third time [right there that's already 3/43 of the total edits since 2005 that Anonymous has so helpfully counted for me!] -- a misattribution someone kept adding, wrongly crediting me with contributions to the work of my mentor.) 4. Anonymous's accusations about violating the Wikipedia rules on "Autobiographies" and "Conflict of Interest" are nonsense not only because (i) managing one's own Wikipedia entry is permissible and widely done, but because (ii) I reveal my identity openly, hence anyone in the (extremely officious!) ranks of Wikipedia's self-appointed editorial hierarchy could at any time have blocked me for "self-promotion" on my entry if I had ever done anything that looked like self-promotion across all those years: "In clear-cut cases, it is permissible to edit pages connected to yourself. So, you can revert vandalism; but of course it has to be simple, obvious vandalism and not a content dispute. Similarly, you should feel free to remove mistaken or unreferenced out-of-date facts about yourself…. and so on."5. In reality, my Wikipedia entry is extremely short, low-key and (if I may say so) modest, among entries of academics (i.e., those who bother to have a Wikipedia entry at all -- or bother with policing their entry if others have created one for them). 6. Not only is my number of self-edits on my Wikipedia entry actually quite low for a current item that has been up since almost the inception of Wikipedia, but I didn't even create my entry! I discovered it there one day in 2005 -- and as I recall it turned out to have been just a bowdlerized cut/paste of the bio from my university staff page, apparently up there since about 2003; so my first edit was to cut it down in size. I've mostly been cleaning up the rot that keeps accumulating across the years since I first discovered it; and I occasionally do a reference update, including updating the photo (the original one, if I recall -- perhaps Anonymous can go and check to correct me? -- had been placed there from an old gif found in Google images). Now, when you are conducting an ad hoc smear campaign against someone you don't like and would love to discredit, you do the kind of Digging That Anonymous did; then you try to put the most sinister possible spin on whatever you think you've come up with (while claiming to just be reporting the objective facts); and if that fails, you get back to digging for and announcing something else. No target is immune to such a litany of innuendos; the charges are endless, and never admitted to have been refuted (like Freudian symptom-transfer, as soon as one fizzles, another one is launched to take its place, without acknowledgment, let alone apology), and it is never conceded that the whole process has been a farce, from beginning to interminable end, all in the service of relentless, malign ends. And this is exactly the kind of thing the Hungarian government, its unidentified informants and sleuths, and the government-side press have been doing in their still-growing campaign selectively directed against the philosophers (and others) they don't like and are bent on punishing. (What I encourage Anonymous To Do next is to go and check my research grants!)
(1) First, please let me cheerily admit what I have never denied: I do indeed speak, read and write Hungarian! (It's just that I have a hunch that it might perhaps be more useful to keep this discourse in a language that all witnesses can understand…) What I had cheerily denied (multiple times) was that I had ever before known (or known of) any of the accused scholars, or that any of them had previously known or contacted me, seeking help. I thereby had disappointingly to disconfirm the hopeful hypothesis of "Anonymous" (who was then going by the patriotic name of "Istvan Magyar" and apparently at a loss to fathom why else anyone could possibly have taken up the victims' cause) as to the real reason I had done so. But now at last Anonymous has astutely discovered my real reason: It was to enhance my Wikipedia profile! (2) I would be no less cheery, though, if "Anonymous" were eventually to find a way to calm his impulse to further enhance my Wikipedia profile by posting my name quite so frequently in the ScienceInsider forum! After all, all those unearned bonus hits in which my name is lately luxuriating are really owing only to having to keep invoking the Anonymity FAQ in declining to respond on ScienceInsider to "Anonymous's" enterprising, persistent but somewhat distracting antics; after all, that's not the only thing Science Forum was created to bring out in the open… Now a light-hearted hypothesis of my own: Since the "signature" of their tactics is so remarkably similar, would it not be an ironic coincidence if this decidedly "Anonymous" doppelganger turned out to be one and the same as that shadowy whistle-blower who had launched the entire philosopher affair with an anonymous police denunciation? Or are they just stylistic and ideological soul-mates? What is the real head-shaker in all this is not that there exist mischievous malcontents like "Anonymous" in Hungary -- they alas flower aplenty, everywhere on the planet -- but that an entire government would stoop to making common cause with their likes. I solemnly promise that if Anonymous and "Istvan Magyar" reveal their true identity I will publicly apologize to them both for the insult of having suspected them to be one and the same scallywag. Alas, different IPs for anonymous posters won't quite do the disentangling trick. And with the abrupt termination of "Istvan Magyar"'s omnipresence on this forum mysteriously coinciding with Anonymous's debut, and only the charming style and somewhat inquisitorial slant perduring, one can hardly be blamed for thinking... (though my conscience is a little relieved upon hearing that "IM"/A is not a stranger to being ill-used in internet discussions). Otherwise, the Anonymity FAQ is all I can offer by way of trying to make amends for "Double Trouble"'s travails. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, January 6. 2011Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum
The following query came up on the UKCORR mailing list:
"I was surprised to read the paragraph below under author's rights":You can't blame Elsevier's Perplexed Permissions Personnel for trying: After all, if researchers -- clueless and cowed about copyright -- have already lost nearly two decades of research access and impact for no reason at all, making it clear that only if/when they are required (mandated) by their institutions and funders will they dare to do what is manifestly in their own best interests and already fully within their reach, then it's only natural that those who perceive their own interests to be in conflict with those of research and researchers will attempt to see whether they cannot capitalize on researchers' guileless gullibility, yet again."[you retain] the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional web site or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher - see [here] agreements for further information)" In three words, the above "restrictions" on the green light to make author's final drafts OA are (1) arbitrary, (2) incoherent, and (3) unenforceable. They are the rough equivalent of saying: You have "the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional web site or server for scholarly purposes -- but not if you are required to do so by your institution or funder." They might as well have added "or if you have a blue-eyed uncle who prefers tea to toast on alternate Tuesdays." My own inclination is to say that if researchers prove to be stupid enough to fall for that, then they deserve everything that is coming to them (or rather, withheld from them). But even I, seasoned cynic that the last 20 years have made me, don't believe that researchers are quite that stupid -- though I wouldn't put it past SHERPA/Romeo to go ahead and solemnly enshrine this latest bit of double-talk in one of its slavish lists of "Restrictions" on a publisher's otherwise "green" self-archiving policy, thereby helpfully furnishing an effective pseudo-official megaphone for every such piece of optimistic gibberish a publisher ventures to float, no matter how absurd. My advice to authors (if, unlike what the sensible computer scientists and physicists have been doing all along -- namely, self-archiving for two decades without first seeking anyone's blessing -- they only durst self-archive if their publishers have first given them their green light to do so) is that they take their publishers at their word when they do give them their green light to do so, and ignore any SHERPA/Romeo tommy-rot their publishers may try to append to that green light to make it seem as if there is any rational line that can be drawn between "yes, you may make your refereed final draft OA" and "no, you may not make your refereed final draft OA." For those who are interested in knowing what is actually happening, worldwide, insofar as OA self-archiving is concerned, I recommend reading Peter Suber's stirring 2010 Summary of real progress rather than the sort of pseudo-legalistic smoke-screening periodically emitted by Permissions Department Pundits (whether or not not they are canonized by SHERPA-Romeo). Dixit, Your Weary and Wizened Archivangelist PS If you think my dismay is less with a publisher having a go at floating some self-serving obfuscation than with an OA service providing a channel for amplifying that obfuscation, then you've caught my drift! But don't forget that the lion's share of the dismay is reserved for the feckless research community, crouched in Zeno's Paralysis for two decades now... Friday, October 8. 2010Cornell, Arxiv and Institutional vs. Central Repositories
On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Joseph Esposito wrote (in liblicense):
JE:It varies by field. In HEP and Astro, most published journal articles are also self-archived in Arxiv. To understand the meaning of this, however, it is important to note that extremely few papers that are self-archived in Arxiv are not (eventually) published in journals: Arxiv is an access-provider -- to published and pre-publication research papers. Arxiv is not a publisher: Arxiv neither peer-reviews its contents, nor does it certify that they have been peer-reviewed; the publisher does that. Hence, like all open access repositories, Arxiv is a supplement to publication, not a substitute for it. JE:No one wants Arxiv to disappear, but I'll bet that within a decade or sooner Arxiv will just be another automated central harvester of distributed local deposits from authors' own institutional repositories (IRs), not a central locus of direct, institution-external deposit. In the age of IRs, it is no longer necessary -- nor does it make sense -- for authors to self-archive institution-externally. It is also a needless central expense to manage deposit centrally. It makes much more sense to deposit institutionally and harvest centrally. JE:Once all universities have IRs and IR self-archiving mandates, there will be no need to fund repositories for institution-external deposit. Harvesting is cheap. And each university's IR will be a standard part of its online infrastructure. JE:The IR cost per paper deposited will be closer to 50c than $50, once all universities are hosting their own output, and mandating that it be deposited. JE:Guess again! Once the burden of hosting, access-provision and archiving is offloaded onto each author's institution, the only service that journals will need to provide is peer review, and hence journals will be charging institutions a lot less than they are charging now. (Print editions as well as online editions and their costs will be gone too.) On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 12:57 AM, Simeon Warner wrote (in jisc-repositories): Simeon, I can only repeat the premise under which that prediction is made:SH:SW: Cornell has not mandated deposit, and it is far from hosting all of its annual output. Ditto for all but about 100 universities so far worldwide. (Not to mention that Cornell and many other universities may not have picked the optimal free IR software solution either ;>) ...) SW:Yes, you have significant scale. But, for Arxiv, it is Cornell, a federal grant, plus funds from some universities that are paying for all the deposits, from all universities, in that one central repository. To repeat: The sensible solution (and probably the only practical, affordable, sustainable one) is for Arxiv -- and any other central archives like it in other fields -- to harvest their respective content automatically from Institutional Repositories that host their own research output. (Institutions, after all, are the universal providers of all that content.) The annual cost per paper deposited will be far less for an Institutional Repository -- hosting only its own research output -- once the institutions are indeed hosting all of their own annual research output -- and not just a small fragment of it, as now. Most institutions today have IRs that are still near-empty rather than at full capacity (as far as OA's target content is concerned). (The cost/benefit of universities hosting their own grey literature output and other kinds of content they generate is another matter, but not to be reckoned into this comparison with Arxiv regarding per-article cost. IRs can archive lots of kinds of things, including departmental reports or family photo albums, if desired...) And Cornell, of course, has the double burden of hosting a near-empty, unmandated IR for its own refereed research output, plus the (partial) expense of hosting Arxiv for the rest of the world! See: Why Cornell's Institutional Repository Is Near-Empty More: http://bit.ly/MoreOnCornellPolicy SW:There are many valid reasons for institutions creating and supporting their IRs -- but only if they mandate that they be filled with their target content. Among those many valid reasons are economic ones: ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (“Open Access,” OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al’s modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research. SW:Arxiv is a repository for articles that have been or will be refereed and published by journals. There is an "author pays" model for paying for that refereeing and publishing through author/institution publication fees (for OA journals, and a subscription model for non-OA journals, which are still the vast majority). -- But there is not, never was, and never need be an "author pays" model merely to pay for the deposit of the author's draft of those same articles. Arxiv is a repository, providing access, not a publisher of refereed research. It is the many different journals in which Arxiv's depositors publish who are still the ones doing the refereeing and the publishing (i.e., implementing the peer review process and certifying the outcome, if successful, as having met that journal's established quality standards). And journals need to recover the costs of providing that essential service, either via journal subscriptions tolls or via "author pays" (i.e., article publication fees) On this you are entirely right, Simeon (though I think the term "overlay journals" is a misdescription of what may eventually come to pass, once all refereed, published articles are being self-archived in their author's IR).SH:SW: (And Cornell is aiding and abetting the very trend you mention, by agreeing pre-emptively to subsidize "author pays" costs for (some of) Cornell authors' articles while failing to mandate self-archiving of all of Cornell authors' articles, cost-free!) See: http://bit.ly/PreemptiveCOPEandSCOAP3 Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. SW:Many of the necessary tools are not needed at the individual IR level, because search takes place at the harvester level. What IRs lack is not tools, but content. Once we have the OA's target content (refereed journal articles), developing the tools is a piece of cake. SW:We can cross that bridge when we get to it -- if Google Scholar does not cross it for us -- once the target content is indeed being deposited in the IRs, globally -- because deposit has been universally mandated at long last. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, September 20. 2010Librarians are self-archiving at twice the global baseline rate
Holly Mercer reports that the self-archiving rate in library and information science is nearly 50% among librarians (and double the 20% global baseline even among nonlibrarians). Nevertheless, not even all articles for which immediate OA self-archiving has been endorsed by their publishers (c. 58-68%) are yet being self-archived even in library and information science, let alone the over 90% after embargo (or the 100% that can be deposited immediately in Closed Access allowing the semi-automatic eprint-request Button to provide Almost-OA during any embargo).
Among the potential solutions, the most important and effective one is for institutions and funders to mandate self-archiving. (Several library faculties have already taken the intiaitive of doing this.) It is also important to make institutional repository deposit the official mechanism for submitting publications for institutional and national performance review (see Liège model). One slight correction: Alma Swan's reported rate of 49% self-archiving was not for total articles; it was just the percentage of authors who said they had self-archived at least once. (And both Alma's studies and those of others have found that authors are often not sure what they mean when they say they have self-archived!) This too will be self-corrected as self-archiving mandates, with their links to research assessment, grow. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, August 9. 2010On COPE Commitments and Double DrippingIn "How much does a COPE-compliant open-access fund cost?", Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard's historic faculty consensus on mandating Green Open Access Self-Archiving, has explained that the purpose of the "Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity" (COPE) commitment of funds to pay Gold OA publishing costs is (1) to provide a "safety net" for publishers, that (2) COPE does not fund hybrid Gold or (3) double-dipping, and that (4) the amount of money involved is trivial. Stuart accordingly asks that "harangues [in particular from me!] about open-access funds amounting to throwing away large quantities of valuable dollars [should] please stop now."For what it’s worth, my objections to COPE are not based on double-dipping, nor on the amount committed; they are not even based on COPE per se. They are based on committing to COPE without first committing to mandating Green OA. It is good that COPE does not propose to fund hybrid Gold (where the journal continues to get paid for subscriptions, and also gets paid for those articles that pay extra to be made OA). That’s double-dipping — though the publishers can (and some do) reply (in words to the effect) that: A safety net to preserve current revenue streams, regardless of their source.“No, it’s not double-dipping, it’s just a safety net, in case the market ever swings toward Gold: For now, we will reduce our subscriptions proportionately, to reflect any Gold OA revenues. If and when the transition is complete, it’s complete: all revenues come from Gold OA fees, zero from subscriptions. Never any double-dipping.” [not a real quote] No, the ones who are double-dripping (sic) are the institutions, who are spending money on buying in subscriptions, and -- whether they pay for hybrid Gold or pure-gold COPE journals (e.g., in the Springer/BMC “Membership" Deal) -- also spending money on Gold (scarce money, reputedly, given the years of agonizing over the serials crisis and journal price inflation). But even that would not matter, if the institutions were just to mandate Green OA first. But committing to paying for Gold OA of any description without first mandating Green OA strikes me as a real head-shaker. (Of the eight universities Stuart lists as having committed to pay [something] for Gold OA, only two -- Harvard and MIT -- have mandated Green OA.) What we need today is OA, not safety nets for publishers. Green OA mandates will bring us OA: 100% OA. Instead fiddling pre-emptively with the future of publishing will not. Stuart has made such a brilliant, unique contribution to OA in orchestrating Harvard’s historic Green OA mandate. I continue to feel perplexed as to to why he is squandering any of his considerable expertise and influence at this critical juncture on persuading universities to squander their scarce resources (no matter how minimally) on pre-emptive Gold (as a publishers’ safety net) without first persuading them to follow his own gloriously Green example first (which was to mandate Green OA first, and then commit to spending some money on Gold OA). Upon reflection, I remember that Stuart has actually given a hint of why he has become so preoccupied with Gold: Because one of the obstacles he had encountered in convincing faculty to vote-in a Green OA mandate by consensus, as Harvard FAS did, was (some) authors’ worries about publishers’ future. So maybe the preoccupation with creating a safety net for publishers is really for the (sense of) safety of authors, so they are more likely to vote-in a Green OA mandate by consensus? But the Harvard FAS’s historic consensus on Green OA came before any commitment to a Gold safety net. And the same is true of the over 150 other Green OA mandates worldwide to date (though most were adopted by presidential or provostial wisdom, rather than waiting for faculty to come to any consensus). Wouldn’t a less costly and circuitous way of calming individuals’ concerns about the safety of publishers under Green OA mandates be to point out that if subscription publishing were ever caused to become unsustainable because of the availability of Green OA, the vast sums of money that institutions are now spending on subscriptions would then by the very same token be released as the “safety net” to pay for the conversion to Gold OA? Does the first step really have to be pre-emptive payment, even token payment, rather than just going ahead and mandating the Green and letting the future of publishing take care of itself -- while the research community takes care of getting its research into the hands of all its intended users at long last, instead of just those whose institutions can afford a subscription? Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, July 27. 2010The Mandate of Open Access Institutional Repository ManagersIn a UKSG Serials News posting, "Are we nearly there yet? On the road to open access",Graham Stone [GS], Repository Manager, University of Huddersfield and Chair, UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) wrote: GS: "Not too long ago, I took a phone call from an academic colleague from the Health Sciences regarding the submission of an article to Biomed Central. [The colleague] phoned me as I am the 'Repository guy' and [the colleague was] learning to play the 'Repository game', that is getting their work out there on open access and increasing their citations. [The colleague was] very impressed that so many people downloaded their last paper within days of it appearing in the Repository."This upbeat-sounding paragraph is unfortunately a series of (familiar) misunderstandings and non-sequiturs about Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IRs): (1) Biomed Central (BMC) is a gold OA (pay-to-publish) journal publisher. (2) Publishing in a BMC journal has nothing to do with depositing an article in "the Repository." Which Repository -- Huddersfield's? You don't need to publish in a pay-to-publish gold OA journal in order to deposit in a green OA Institutional Repository (IR) like Huddersfield's, nor in order to benefit from the increased downloads and citations that OA makes possible. All you do is publish in whatever journal you publish in, and deposit the final refereed draft in your OA IR as soon as it is accepted for publication. Or was the deposit in PubMed Central (PMC, not BMC)? Likewise no payment required (but what does deposit in that institution-external repository have to do with U. Huddersfield's IR, or its IR manager?). (3) There is no "Repository game". There is just the research and publication game. (Providing OA maximizes research access, usage and impact, and OA can be provided in two ways. I. "Gold OA": by publishing in an OA journal (of which the major ones require payment to publish); or II. "Green OA": by publishing in any journal at all -- whether subscription-based or OA -- and also depositing the final draft in your OA IR: no payment required. The "game" is merely ensuring that all potential users have online access to your published articles, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happened to be published.) GS: "It struck me as very interesting that to [this colleague], the next stage of the 'game' was to consider switching from green to gold open access - providing someone would pay of course!"The colleague sounds like a researcher who has just deposited an article for the first time in an OA repository (perhaps PMC, though it should have been Huddersfield's IR), and not a researcher who has just paid BMC for gold OA publication (otherwise the colleague would know who was paying!). Something has definitely been garbled here... GS: "This is not the first time that this topic has come up in conversation in the past few weeks. At the recent LIBER conference at Aarhus University in Denmark discussion over dinner turned to open access. One comment from a colleague was that green open access could not be successful in the long run as this was a compromise, and 'compromises never work'."How is providing OA to one's published article by depositing it in one's IR a "compromise"? A compromise of what, with what, for whom? Depositing an article in an IR consists of a few minutes' worth of keystrokes that maximize the access, usage and impact of one's article. But perhaps the LIBER discussion was not among (1) researchers, discussing the problem of how to "get their work out there on open access and increase their citations" rather than continue to allow access to it to be restricted only to those researchers whose institutions can afford to pay for subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published... Perhaps the LIBER discussion was instead among (2) librarians, discussing the problem of how to afford to pay for subscription access? Or perhaps the LIBER discussion was among (3) publishers, discussing the problem of how to guarantee current subscription revenue streams in a growing climate of demand for open access on the part of researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the research? To repeat: In what sense is green OA self-archiving a "compromise"? A compromise of what, with what, for whom? Is a university repository manager a representative of the immediate interests of the university's researchers (and their institutions, funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the research), or of the interests of publishers and their present and future business models? If librarians are to fulfill the role of repository managers, they need to re-think what they are doing, and why, and what it is that researchers and research need in the OA era. An OA IR is not a buy-in collection of journal subscriptions: It is a give-away provision of access to an institution's published journal articles. An OA IR manager is not a serials librarian, nor someone appointed to direct or second-guess the future course of serials publishing. An OA IR manager is someone appointed to make sure the university's OA IR is filled with its primary target content: the university's published journal article output. "UKCoRR has a vision of the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions." -- What is that "professionally recognised and supported role" if it is not filling their institution's repository with its intended content? GS: "The road to open access is covered in gold and this is the way forward."The way forward for whom? And according to whom? And in the interests of what? Researchers can be mandated to provide green OA for their published work. (Without mandates, only about 20% or articles are self-archived.) And funds -- if any are available -- can be provided to pay for gold OA. But publishers cannot be mandated to provide gold OA. And the funds to pay for gold OA cannot be mandated while they are still tied up in paying for subscriptions (and while the asking price for gold OA is designed to preserve publishers' current revenue streams and modus operandi, come what may). The road to green OA is wide open, and traversing it is entirely in the hands of researchers (and their institutions and funders). The road to gold OA is not wide open; it costs money, and it is in the hands of publishers, not researchers. And the potential money to pay for gold OA is currently tied up in institutions' subscription fees, which are being paid to publishers, by institutions' libraries. So how is the road to OA covered with gold, and how is it the way forward? And what has this to do with the research repository manager's "professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions"? GS: "A few days earlier, Kurt de Belder from Leiden University in the Netherlands had laid out his vision of the future, which assumed that open access would be via the gold route and if Repositories existed, they would only contain grey literature."Kurt de Melder is the director of Leiden University's library (and an advisor to several publishers). Does his golden vision (like the green vision) include a practical means (like the green vision's mandates) of getting us from here to there? Or is it all just a golden wish, waiting passively (apart from any spare money being spent on pre-emptive gold OA payments) for publishers to convert to gold and release everyone's subscription money (for incoming journals) to pay their asking price for gold OA (for outgoing articles)? And while the institution's library keeps waiting for this to happen directly, of its own accord, is the access, usage and impact of the institution's research output to continue to be denied to all but subscribing institutions, as it is today, while institutions' IRs (which already exist, by the way) are devoted instead to "grey literature" (whatever that means) instead of to refereed research (green OA)? And meanwhile, visions aside, those who have their eyes wide open cannot help but notice that IRs (which already do exist, remember) do contain green content (20%) rather than just grey content, and that green deposit mandates can and do drive up the percentage green from the baseline 20% to 60%, and approaching 100% within a few years. What's missing, and needed (for those with eyes wide open to see) is more green OA mandates from institutions and funders -- not armchair or dinner-table visions of the future of publishing, evoked in the thrall of pre-emptive gold fever (with no critical reflection on or answerability to practical means and ends). That, perhaps (rather than gold fever), would come closer to a substantive "vision of the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions." GS: "Personally, and not as Chair of UKCoRR (UK Council of Research Repositories), I must admit that I am starting to agree with the gold only route, although I'm not sure I should."If the Chair of UK's Council of Research Repositories is starting to agree (whether personally or ex officio) with the gold-only route, then perhaps it is time for the Chair to think of resigning, and allowing UKCoRR's direction to be set by those who understand the needs of research and researchers, the power of green OA IRs, and the urgent need for Green OA mandates. Surely there is a "UK Council of Publishing Business Models" that could be joined instead, by those who have become afflicted with gold fever, forgetting about research and researchers' urgent immediate need for OA, and IRs' mission to provide it. GS: "I have been espousing the virtues of green open access for nearly five years. At Huddersfield we have 26% full text in the Repository despite not yet having a mandate and our full text downloads are really taking off - 46,000 in the last 12 months."If that 26% is 26% of Huddersfield's current yearly research output, then that deposit rate is somewhat above the global spontaneous (i.e., unmandated) baseline deposit rate of about 20%, but it is a far cry from what the deposit rate would be if Huddersfield were to adopt a mandate. A repository manager espousing the interests of Huddersfield's researchers should be espousing the virtues of green OA mandates to Huddersfield's researchers and administration, not just the virtues of providing green OA spontaneously (although that is, of course, welcome too). Well over five years' consistent experience (and surveys) worldwide have shown that most researchers will not deposit spontaneously but they will deposit (willingly) if deposit is mandated. In the past few years, it is not spontaneous deposit rates that have been picking up, but the rate of adoption of deposit mandates, and the resulting green OA. This is not the time for repository managers to succumb to gold fever (which leads next to nowhere, and is not even part of their remit), resigning their IRs to warehousing "grey literature." GS: "However, for some time I have had my doubts as to whether the championing of green open access was actually taking us down the right road. I could see that gold open access was a good business model. "If we all commit to deposit, we don't need green OA self-archiving mandates. But we don't all commit to deposit, even though it costs nothing. Only about 20% commit unmandated (26% at Huddersfield, perhaps because the IR manager has for five years espoused the virtues of spontaneous deposit so persuasively). But even fewer commit to gold OA, because it costs money, because most of the top journals don't offer it, and because the money to pay for it is still tied up in paying for subscriptions. And there are no mandates to require researchers to pay for gold OA, nor to release the subscription money, nor to dictate publishers' business model or modus operandi, nor to set their asking price. Besides, none of that is within an OA IR manager's remit. It has nothing to do with "the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions." An OA IR manager is supposed to get his IR filled with OA's target content, and that target content is supposed to be, first and foremost, peer-reviewed journal articles, most of which are today still being published in subscription journals. What needs to be championed by IR managers (and a fortiori, by the Chair of the UK Council of Research Repositories), and championed for their researchers and their institutions, are the virtues of green OA mandates that will fill their IRs -- not the virtues of "good business models," championed for publishers, by librarians. (You don't need to be a "professional and supported" IR manager to go down that road.) And those who are indeed committed to championing green OA mandates worldwide are beginning to win them. GS: "The trouble to me is that the [gold OA] model only really works if we all commit. Otherwise, you end up paying twice, once for the open access article and once for the journal subscription. I just didn't see how we arrived at this brave new world of gold open access journals, no serials budgets and stuff in the cloud."Yes, that's indeed the size of it: "The [gold OA] model only really works if we all commit. Otherwise, you end up paying twice, once for the open access article and once for the journal subscription." Trying to go directly from the status quo to gold OA is quite simply self-contradictory, like an Escher drawing of an impossible shape: Institutional subscription access tolls are paid per incoming journal; individual OA publication fees are paid per outgoing article. The money to pay for gold OA fees is tied up in subscription tolls. But institutions cannot cancel their journal subscriptions unless the journals' contents are accessible to their users otherwise. Institutions are not necessarily even subscribing annually, for their users, to the same journals in which their researchers are occasionally publishing. Catch 22. (And, as Graham notes, anyone foolish and gullible enough to believe hybrid gold publishers (the ones who charge both subscription tolls + optional gold OA fees) when they say they will reduce subscription tolls proportionately as gold OA fee revenues increase is forgetting that this requires institutions to find the money to pay the gold asking price first, while it is still being spent on the subscriptions! A good "business model" indeed…) (By the way, the somewhat uneven distribution of wealth on the planet can also be fixed "if we all commit." That's not just gold fever, it's the Golden Rule -- but alas far too few in our gene pool are committed to practising it...) GS: "But maybe I can see how we get to gold open access now? With researchers taking ownership of the 'game' by realising that gold open access is the only way to ensure access for all and increased citations, maybe we are on the right road after all?"Researchers "taking ownership of the 'game'"? by "reaising that gold OA is the only way"? The self-contradiction on the road to there from here is resolved by "realisation"? By researchers? (The same researchers for whom the only thing they need to do to provide OA is a few keystrokes? And they're not even "committed" enough to do those keystrokes, unless they are first mandated by their institutions or funders?) What does this vision envision that researchers are to do with this newfound golden realisation of theirs? The same thing 34,000 of them did (unsuccessfully) back in 2000? Sign a petition to boycott their journals if they don't go OA? And if researchers were really that committed to "ensuring access for all and increased citations," wouldn't it be simpler than making empty threats against all their publishers just to petition their one and only institution to mandate deposit? Better still, if their realisation about "the only way" were that profound, wouldn't researchers just go ahead and do the keystrokes to deposit of their own accord, unmandated, in order to "ensure access for all, and increased citations"? And would it not be a remarkable coincidence it it turned out that the most pressing thing on researchers' minds was not, in fact, the access and impact of their work (which they can already maximize with a few green keystrokes), but a "good business model" for their publishers and their long-suffering librarians? A remarkable coincidence that what researchers had been yearning for all along turned out (upon "realisation") to be exactly the same thing their librarians had been yearning for -- which was not the filling of their OA IRs but relief from the serials crisis? GS: "And maybe, instead of the superfast highway to gold open access that some envisage, are we travelling down the leafy lane of green open access with gold just around the next corner? A bit round the houses, but yes we are certainly getting there."The super-fast highway to gold OA? Amidst all this "realisation," I don't recall hearing the game plan for solving the problem of the toll booths posted along the ubiquitous subscription highways -- the ones that are currently gobbling up institutions' serial budgets (i.e., the funds that would be used instead to pay for gold OA)... But it is true that green OA, once it becomes universal, may eventually get us to gold OA too -- if universal availability of green eventually causes universal cancellations, forcing journals to cut costs, downsize, and convert to gold OA, thereby releasing the windfall subscription savings to pay the reduced cost of gold OA (peer review alone, with the print and online editions gone, and all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the worldwide network of OA IRs). But that's not around the next corner, when we're still at 20% green OA. And we are certainly getting ahead of ourselves, if we don't provide the universal green OA first -- for that's what any eventual subscription cancellation windfall is dependent upon. The cancellations can't be done pre-emptively. Certainly not by a single institution, or IR manager -- not even the Chair of the UK Council of Research Repositories. That would require universal institutional subscription cancellations, and all at once (not one institution or country at a time -- otherwise the researchers of that institution or country, instead of gaining open access, lose subscription access altogether). My recommendation to OA IR managers who envision "the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions" would be to focus on their own mandate, which is to fill their own institution's IRs, not to dream about business models that are as good as gold. And the way to get their OA IRs filled is already known: It is by getting their institutions to mandate green OA. (No one connected in any way with OA IRs has a more "professionally recognised and supported role within [their] research institutions" then Southampton's Les Carr and Harvard's Stuart Shieber, the architects of their respective institutions' green OA mandates (Southampton's being the first and Harvard's the most famous). It's not too late for Huddersfield -- or Nottingham, or the rest of the 17,000 universities that have not yet adopted a mandate. That's all. And that's enough. Mandate green OA for your institution and rest will take care of itself, in its own time. But meanwhile your institution's researchers will "ensure access for all, and increased citations." That, after all -- not "a good business model" -- is the purpose of OA, and hence the mandate of OA IR managers. See "Waiting for Gold" On 2010-07-30, at 2:50 AM, Charles Oppenheim [CO] wrote in JISC-Repositories: CO: "Mr Stone's (and other repository managers') Job Specifications may say something like "your job is to ensure that articles produced by staff in this University are made OA, whether by means of the Institutional Repository or by any other means deemed appropriate." So, whilst not disagreeing with the argument that the priority should be green repositories, repository managers should not ignore alternative approaches that also produce increased downloads and citations and promote the institution's reputation. Even if their job specification is tied to their IR, it would be an unprofessional Repository Manager who was not interested in the pros and cons of alternative methods for achieving OA. Being professional means taking a holistic view of things! I see nothing incompatible therefore between Mr Stone's remarks and being chairman of UKCoRR."But GS had written: And CO has replied:GS: "I have been espousing the virtues of green open access for nearly five years… However, for some time I have had my doubts as to whether the championing of green open access was actually taking us down the right road… Kurt de Belder... assumed that open access would be via the gold route and if Repositories existed, they would only contain grey literature… I must admit that I am starting to agree with the gold only route…" If the university repository manager's "job is to ensure that articles produced by staff in this University are made OA, whether by means of the Institutional Repository or by any other means deemed appropriate," it is not clear why the job is called "repository manager."CO: "...priority should be given to green repositories..." (It sounds like something more like "publication advisor" -- and if that advice is to take the gold only route, then it sounds like an anti-repository manager!) Rather than twist simple and obvious job descriptions into complicated ideological knots, might it not be more sensible to look carefully at the concrete, practical reasons why repository managers' "priority should be [filling] green repositories" rather than "the gold only route"? After all, GS himself wrote that the "trouble to me is that the [gold OA] model only really works if we all commit. Otherwise, you end up paying twice." But GS never went on to explain how to surmount this impasse (whereas my posting [above] explains quite explicitly why you could not -- unless universal green OA came first). Yet this impasse did not seem to deter Huddersfield's green repository manager and UKCoRR's chairman from announcing that he was "starting to agree with the gold only route" because he "could see that gold open access was a good business model." CO: "And before Stevan explodes at this posting, let me say (yet again) that I am a strong supporter of the green approach to OA. But I am not blind to the existence, and in some cases success, of alternative OA approaches."Indisputably there is not one but two ways to provide OA. (We -- CO and 8 other co-authors -- defined the two ways ourselves in a Nature Web Focus six years ago: But from the capability of providing OA to some of the planet's annual 2.5 million refereed journal articles in two different ways, green and gold, it does not follow that each of the ways is capable of scaling up to providing OA to all (or even much or most) of the planet's annual 2.5 million refereed journal articles.Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. This is where the sticky Escherian details (about annual percentage green and gold OA, ongoing subscription needs and commitments, double payment, and especially the power of green mandates) come in. Surely the practical and professional mandate of the newly minted job title "repository manager" is not just a matter of abstract principles but of concrete, practical reality. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, July 17. 2010Funders Should Mandate Institutional Deposit (and, if desired, central harvest)
SUMMARY: The most effective and natural way to ensure that all institutions -- the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, in all fields -- provide open access (OA) to all of their peer-reviewed research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) is for both funders and institutions to mandate cooperative, convergent deposit, by the author, in the author's own institutional repository, rather than competitive, divergent institutional-and/or-institution-external deposit by authors-and/or-publishers.
1. It is important for OA advocates to understand that it is not PubMed Central (PMC) that is making biomedical articles open access (OA) -- it is the depositors of those articles. In the case of PMC, those depositors are authors (and publishers). PMC is serving both as a locus of deposit (i.e., a central, subject-based repository) and as a locus of search and use (like google).Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, July 8. 2010On Comparing Institutional Apples With Multi-Institutional Fruit: The Denominator Fallacy Again
Chris Armbruster [CA] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
CA: "'Institution' is indeed not a very precise concept, but the repository ranking will not be improved if one were to spend much time trying to decide which repository is institutional and which is not"If there is any rationale for separately ranking and comparing -- as the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR) does -- both the top 800 repositories and the top 800 institutional repositories (and there is indeed an important rationale for doing so), then that rationale is that the institutions are indeed institutional and not multi-institutional. The purpose is to rank their relative size (and hence their success in capturing their target content), and there is no point in comparing the size of the category "apple" with the size of the category "fruit." This is the "denominator fallacy." The pro's and con's of Chris Armbruster's advocacy of central (multi-institutional) repositories over institutional repositories have already been multiply discussed over the years in this Forum and elsewhere. The argument for institutional repositories is that (1) institutions are the providers of all of OA's target content, (2) they have a stake in managing their own output, and (most important of all) (3) they are in a position to mandate the deposit of their own output. The argument for multi-institutional (central) repositories is that they look (superficially) as if they were bigger, hence more "successful" in attracting OA's target content. (Hence Chris's preference for keeping the two kinds of repositories and their sizes conflated in the RWWR rankings.) They also look (superficially) more manageable and sustainable. The argument against multi-institutional (central) repositories is (a) that multi-institutional entities (notably, funders) cannot mandate the deposit of all institutional research output (because not all research is funded), (b) that central deposit mandates compete with instead of reinforcing institutional mandates (eliciting resistance from authors facing the prospect of having to do double-deposits), and (most relevantly here) (c) that the size and success of a repository can only be evaluated and compared in relation to the size of that repository's total target output: And although there are differences among institutions in the size of their own total output (which can and should be weighted to normalize it and make it comparable), the differences in size between institutions and multi-institutions is the difference in size between the number of apples and the number of fruit. (The denominator fallacy.) Multi-institutional (central) repositories' content would have to be weighted by the output of all their actual and potential target institutions and the total target content of each, in order to make multi-institutional rankings comparable to those of individual institutions. RWWR is not doing that kind of weighting -- nor would it be easy to determine those weightings for each kind of multi-institutional repository, though it may eventually be possible to estimate in principle. If it were done, however, there would hardly be any need for two rankings (for repositories vs. institutional repositories). What would be clear from a proper denominator-weighted ranking of institutional and multi-institutional repositories is that, contrary to what Chris has argued, it is not at all true that the multi-institutional repositories are bigger or more successful in collecting their respective total target contents. Rather, it makes much more sense for both institutions and funders to mandate that researchers deposit in their own institutional repository -- from which multi-institutional collections could then be automatically harvested. (It would then be redundant to try to compare their relative success, as one would clearly be a derivative of the other.) For management and sustainability, local institutional deposit and central harvesting is the complementary -- and optimal -- solution. But first the primary content-provision problem has to be solved, otherwise there is next to nothing to manage and sustain! CA: "how about also deleting No 10 because it is only a departmental repository?"A departmental repository, in contrast, is sub-institutional rather than multi-institutional. Hence, unless there is to be a separate RWWR ranking of the top 800 departmental mandates, there is no harm in listing the departmental repositories among the institutional repositories -- except if the university has both an institutional and a departmental repository, and the contents of the departmental repository are also a proper subset of the contents of the institutional repository, hence double-counted. This is not the case in the instance of ["institutional"] repository #10, University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, whose contents are not part of institutional repository #27, University of Southampton. Rather than resulting in an inflated ranking for Southampton, this actually results in a lower ranking. The joint RWWR ranking of the integrated institutional repository would be higher for Southampton. (That said, with a properly weighted denominator, separately tagged departmental repositories would be useful at this time, to compare the relative success of institution-wide mandates vs. departmental/school/faculty mandates -- i.e., Arthur's Sale's "patchwork mandate" strategy.) CA: "Also, it is a bad idea to define repositories as institutional only if they restrict themselves to the output of a single institution. We already have too many repository managers who succumb to this kind of institutionalist logic - and reject OA content only because it is not from their own institution."If only the problem were that of an overflowing cup, with so much OA target content that it needs to be rejected! Chris has the OA content problem completely upside-down! The problem is that not enough of each institution's own OA target content is being deposited, anywhere -- not that institutions are declining to host the output of other institutions. (It is only Chris's central-repository preoccupation that makes him imagine that the latter is the problem.) What's missing is not repositories to deposit in, but mandates to deposit. The solution is for institutions and funders to mandate institutional deposit of all content, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines -- and then, if desired, to harvest that content into various central collections, by discipline, funder, language or nation, as desired. Institutions are the universal providers of all that content; they are also the natural locus for deposit mandates. CA: "The CSIC has a sound methodology for ranking repositories, and it not their job to define exclusively what is an IR and what not. And in cyberspace it is much more interesting to compare repositories according to domains and services they offer…"I take it that by the CSIC Chris means the RWWR. And as far as I can tell, the only reason Chris finds the methodology sound is that it conflates institutional and multi-institutional repositories, which favors Chris's preference for multi-institutional repositories. What is much more interesting and important in cyberspace than the locus of the distributed content is the presence of the content. Most (80%) of OA's target content is still missing from anywhere on the (free) web, and long overdue. Locus matters strategically for the concrete, practical goal of capturing that target content (and making it OA). Chris keeps systematically missing this point. If the content were all there already, none of this would matter in the slightest. (And a good intuition pump to bear in mind is that the key to the success of Google and the like was not to try to get everyone to deposit their content directly in Google: What happened, and worked, was distributed, local deposit and hosting, followed by central harvesting. Not a bad principle to generalize to OA...) CA: "Moreover, it would help if we could move beyond the often narrow understanding of what an institutional repository is and what not & acknowledge more clearly that a strategy of privileging institutional repositories as such has not helped."Chris does not seem to have noticed the growing institutional/departmental repository mandate movement (initiated in 2002 by Southampton ECS, but greatly accelerated since the 16th mandate in 2008 by Harvard FAS, and now running well over 100 institutional/departmental mandates, including UCL, MIT and Stanford, as well as over 40 funder mandates). It is not (and never has been) a matter of merely "privileging" institutional deposit, but mandating it. CA: "The value & sustainability of IRs (individually, as isolated instances, & if not embedded in a national system) is rather limited for both scholarship and open access."(1) Repository value is nil without content. (2) With content, locus is irrelevant, as search is not local but global, via central harvesters. (3) Sustainability is a red herring (especially with today's sparse OA content); institutional deposit loci and central harvesters are complementary, insofar as preservation is concerned. (4) Nations can and should mandate OA deposit. Nations can and should harvest OA deposits centrally. But there is no earthly need (or prospect) of nations directly hosting all their institutional OA output centrally, any more than there is any earthly need for nations to host all their institutions centrally. (5) If Chris is worried about limitations on OA scholarship, he should set his mind to thinking of how to induce the OA target content providers (institutional researchers) to deposit their content, to make it OA. (6) IRs will take care of themselves. CA: "Hence, it is very welcome that more determined efforts are underway at building viable networks of research repositories and integrate IRs in national systems (e.g. Ireland as latest instance)."All true, but a non sequitur, insofar was the fundamental problem of filling those repositories with their target contents is concerned. CA: "For a sustained argument, please see": Armbruster & Romary (2010) Comparing Repository Types: Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication (accepted for publication in IJDLS)For a sustained critique and response, see: I have quickly skimmed (but not read verbatim) the new A & R paper, and I see that all of my prior objections (to A & R's earlier paper) remain unanswered, indeed not even noted.Conflating OA Repository-Content, Deposit-Locus, and Central-Service Issues (1) The 4-way classification system -- subject, nation, "research" and institution -- continues to be arbitrary and rather incoherent. (2) The three far more important and salient distinctions -- direct deposit repositories vs harvested collections, OA target content vs other kinds of content, mandated repositories vs. unmandated repositories -- are not treated (or not treated in enough depth to understand their salience) (3) The all-important question of how best to capture OA's target content -- the most central question, before we even talk about repository types, services or sustainability -- is not given any serious consideration. (4) The very specific question of locus of deposit, and its specific importance for deposit mandates (and hence for capturing the target content) is likewise not given any serious consideration. (5) The "denominator fallacy" continues to pervade throughout, in the continued reference to absolute repository size, without taking into account the size or proportion of the repository's target contents that the repository is actually capturing. (For an institutional repository, the denominator is its total refereed journal article output; for HAL -- which A & R stunningly misclassify as the most successful of all repositories! -- it is the totality of France's refereed journal article output.) In short, A & R's approach -- which takes so much of the current sparse and inchoate landscape for granted, and follows after it, instead of facing the real problem, which is to remedy that sparseness, and lead the way toward capturing the vast proportion of OA's target content (at least 80% of it) that is still not being captured (by any repository) -- is not, I believe, a realistic or productive one. The reality is that most repositories -- of all the kinds A & R consider and don't consider -- are near-empty of their target content. Consequently, search, services and sustainability are not the problem: Content is. Mandates generate the content, but A & R's treatment imagines that mandates, and their promise, amount mostly to funder mandates (and funder -- i.e. "research" repositories). This is (in my view) an enormous error: Not all scholarly and scientific research (perhaps not even the majority of it) is funded, but virtually all of it comes from institutions -- universities and research institutes. In and of itself, that is strong reason to give institutional repositories and institutional mandates far more serious thought than A & R give them. Another reason is that once institutional deposit is mandated and OA contents are being systematically deposited in their institutional repositories, they can be harvested to any other collections we may desire -- subject-based, national, "research" or what-have-you. Nor are the various search and other services that are built atop this OA content meant to be provided at the institutional level (where A & R note their absence as if it were a defect): services are a harvester-level function, whereas content-provision is an institution-level function. A & R's article is also missing the point of depositing the author's rather than the publisher's version (the author's version has far fewer restrictions and can be provided much earlier); nor does it take into account the power of institutional repositories to provide immediate "Almost OA" even in the case of publisher-embargoed content, via the semi-automatic "eprint request" button. A & R also make some incorrect assumptions about the difficult and effort of deposit and the need for library assistance and proxy deposit. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, May 10. 2010OA "Request" vs. "Requirement" Policies: Canada and the Global OA Sweepstakes
In the case of the high-profile NIH Public Access Policy, the difference between a "Request" and a "Requirement" turned out to be substantial. Formulated initially as a "Request," the policy failed to elicit more than 5% compliance for two years. Within a year of being upgraded from a "Request" to a "Requirement," the compliance rate rose to 60%, and is since steadily approaching 100%.
It is for this reason that U. Athabasca's Open Access (OA) Policy is not listed as a mandate in ROARMAP, but only as a policy. By the very same token, however, U. Ottawa's policy is not listed at all in ROARMAP, since it is merely a commitment to provide some funds to pay to publish some U. Ottawa research output in OA journals ("Gold OA"), not a mandate to provide OA to all of U. Ottawa research output ("Green OA") by self-archiving it in an OA repository, as NIH requires and U. Athabasca recommends. By this criterion, U. Concordia's is the first university-wide Green OA mandate in Canada. Canada also has 3 departmental OA mandates (Calgary, Guelph, Queens) and 8 funder mandates. There is not much point in being the "first" to do something if one does not do it right: The only university that has done it right university-wide so far in Canada is Concordia. Let us hope that this will now inspire many emulators. The other important course-correction Canada could benefit from making is to make sure that all OA mandates (university-wide, departmental and funder) are convergent and cooperative, not divergent and competitive. Here too, Concordia has adopted the right policy, promising not to require double-deposit on the part of their researchers (i.e., having to deposit in both the Concordia repository and, say, PubMed Central Canada). Universities (and research institutions) are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, across all fields. PubMed Central Canada is a welcome advance if what Canada needed was more space (to make its research OA). But what Canada needed was to fill available space with OA content, not to make more space available -- and the only way to do that is by mandating (i.e., requiring) deposit. Let us hope Canada's funders will have the good sense to mandate convergent university deposit rather than divergent central deposit. Central repositories like PubMed Central Canada can then harvest from Canada's network of university repositories. Deposit should be institutional; a central collection is just that -- a collection -- not a locus for direct deposit: "Designing the Optimal Open Access Mandate"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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