Open Access Archivangelism

This is the timely and incisive analysis of what is at stake in the question of locus of deposit (institutional vs. central) for open access self-archiving mandates. It was written (in French, and then translated into English) by Prof. Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège and founder of EurOpenScholar. It is re-posted here from Prof. Rentier's blog.

For more background on the important current issues underlying the question of institutional vs. central deposit mandates by universities and research funders, click here.

Liège is one of the c. 30 institutions (plus 30 funders) worldwide that have already adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate .

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Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?

Posted by Bernard Rentier in Open Access

[Also recommended: a remarkable and very complete review of OA by Peter Suber.]

The “Green Open Access (OA)” solution, providing free access to research publications in Institutional Repositories (IRs) via the Web, is certainly the best one, but sooner or later it will face a new wave of centralised thematic or funder repositories (CRs).

The latest initiative comes from the very active EUROHORCs (European Association of Heads of Research Funding Organisations and Research Performing Organisations), well known for its EURYI prizes and its prominent influence on European thinking in the research area. EUROHORCs is working to convince the European Science Foundation (ESF) to set up, through a large subsidy from the EC, a centralised repository (CR) which would be both thematic (Biomedical) and geographic (European). The concept is inspired by PubMed Central, among others.

The EUROHORCs initiative is very well-intentioned. It is based on an awareness that many of us share: It is of the utmost importance that science funded by public money should be made freely and easily accessible to the public (OA). But the initiative also reveals a profound misunderstanding about what OA and researchers’ real needs are all about.

The vision underlying the EUROHORCs initiative is that research results should be deposited directly in a CR. However, if research results are not OA today, this is not because of the lack of a CR to deposit them in, but rather because most authors are simply not yet depositing their articles at all, not even in an IR.

Creating a new repository is hence not the solution for making research OA. The solution lies in universal deposit mandates, from both institutions and funding agencies. If this task is left to large funders such as the European Community, their central repositories will only contain publications of the research they have funded. From this it is easy to see that researchers will ultimately have to deposit their publications in as many repositories as there are funders supporting their research. Not only is this not practical, it is needlessly cumbersome.

The obvious solution is that both research institutions and funding agencies should jointly require IR deposit. Once that systematic coordination has been successfully implemented, if CRs are desired, they can easily be created and filled using compatible software for exporting or harvesting automatically from IRs to CRs.

What is worrisome is the needless double investment in creating two distinct kinds of repositories for direct deposit. This trend seems to rest on the naive notion that, in the Internet era, it is somehow still necessary to deposit things centrally. But in reality, the centralising tool is the harvester, and its search engine. Google Scholar, for example, is quite efficient in finding articles in any repository, institutional or central, yet no one deposits articles directly in Google Scholar. The perceived need for direct-deposit CRs is groundless, technically speaking. Such CRs even run the risk of serving as hosts for only the publications funded by a single funder. IRs guarantee OA webwide for all research output, in all disciplines, from all institutions, regardless of where (or whether) it has been funded.

It is understandable that funders may wish to host a complete collection of the research they have funded, but nowadays that can easily be accomplished by importing it automatically from the more complete collections of the distributed IRs -- since institutions are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded -- as long as funders collaborate with institutions in first ensuring that all the IRs are filled with their own institutional research output.

Besides, the OA philosophy is global. It cannot be reduced to a single continent. Science is universal.

Giving priority to creating more CRs for direct deposit today is not only a waste of time: it is also counterproductive for the growth of convergent funder and institutional mandates. It would generate multiple competing loci of primary deposit for authors -- most of whom, we must not forget, are still not depositing at all.

In conclusion, it seems far more efficient to focus first on filling IRs at this time; once that is accomplished, if it is judged useful, CRs can be configured to collect their data from IRs rather than being used as divergent points of direct deposit themselves.

The potential success of OA, without conflicting head-on with publishers, rests on the deposit of authors' own final drafts of their published articles, through a one-time, simple action on the part of the author. All research is generated from research institutions: IRs are hence the natural locus for author deposit, providing optimal proximity, convenience and congruence with the mission of the author's own institution. The rest is merely technical: a matter of automated data transfer to external CRs.

The EUROHORCs proposal is only worthwhile if it contributes to the secondary harvesting of data from primary IRs. Otherwise, it is missing the point of OA.

ORBi wins its challenge

U. Liège's IR "ORBi" (Open Repository and Bibliography) is fulfilling its promise: over 4,000 references have already been filed since November 26th and, in a happy surprise, 79% of these articles turn out to be full text. This is thus ahead of schedule for our institutional Green OA Mandate (announced in March 2007 to take effect in October 2009): "Whenever the university reviews faculty publications for promotion, tenure, funding, or any other internal purpose, the review will be based exclusively on full texts deposited in the IR."

The graph below shows clearly how the IR contents are growing. And yet a quick calculation also reminds us that we are still far from capturing the actual number of papers published yearly by our university authors.

[Funder mandates can help accelerate and motivate both the adoption of institutional mandates like ours, and author compliance with them -- provided the funder mandates stipulate the author's IR as the single convergent locus for direct deposit (followed by automatized harvest to CRs). If funders instead insist upon direct central deposit in their external CRs, they simply create a needless retardant and disincentive for author compliance, and hence for universal OA, rather than reinforcing and facilitating them.]

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Dépôts institutionnels, thématiques ou centralisés ?

Posté par Bernard Rentier dans Open Access

A lire: une remarquable revue très complète de l’OA par Peter Suber.

La formule des dépôts institutionnels permettant la libre consultation de publications de recherche par l’Internet est certes la meilleure, mais elle est, tôt ou tard, menacée par une nouvelle tendance visant à créer des dépôts thématiques ou des dépôts gérés par des organismes finançant la recherche.

La dernière initiative provient de la très active association EUROHORCs (European association of the heads of research funding organisations and research performing organisations), bien connue pour ses prix EURYI et dont l’influence sur la réflexion européenne en matière de recherche est considérable. Elle tente de convaincre l’European Science Foundation (ESF) de mettre sur pied, grâce à une subvention considérable des Communautés européennes, un dépôt centralisé qui serait à la fois thématique (sciences biomédicales) et localisé (Europe) sur base du principe qui a conduit à la création de PubMed Central, par exemple.

L’idée part d’un bon sentiment. Elle est née d’une prise de conscience que nous partageons tous: il est impératif que la science financée par les deniers publics soit rendue publique gratuitement et commodément. Mais en même temps, elle est fondée sur une profonde méconnaissance de l’Open Access, de l’Open Access Initiative et des besoins réels des chercheurs et des pouvoirs subsidiants.

La notion qui sous-tend cette initiative est que les résultats de la recherche doivent être déposés directement dans un dépôt centralisé. Mais si les résultats de la recherche ne sont pas aujourd’hui en accès libre et ouvert, ce n’est pas parce qu’il manque des dépôts centralisés, c’est tout simplement parce que la plupart des auteurs ne déposent pas leurs articles du tout, même pas dans un dépôt institutionnel.

La solution n’est donc pas de créer un nouveau dépôt. Elle est dans l’obligation pour les chercheurs de déposer leur travail dans un dépôt électronique, cette obligation devant être exigée par les universités et institutions de recherche ainsi que par les organismes finançant la recherche. Si l’on se contente de laisser faire les grands pourvoyeurs de fonds tels que l’Union européenne, on ne disposera dans le dépôt central que des publications de la recherche qu’ils ont financée. On comprend donc qu’àterme, le chercheur sera amené à encoder ses publications dans autant de dépôts différents qu’il bénéficiera de fonds d’origine différente. Ce n’est pas pratique, c’est même inutilement lourd.

Comme les institutions de recherche la produisent (avec ou sans financement public, dans toutes les disciplines, dans tous les pays, dans toutes les langues), la solution qui saute aux yeux est qu’ensemble, les institutions de recherche et les organismes finançants doivent encourager la mise en place de dépôts institutionnels. Ensuite, si l’on tient à réaliser des dépôts centralisés, on pourra toujours le faire, en redondance, et ce sera facile si les logiciels sont compatibles.

Ce qui est inquiétant, c’est l’investissement, redondant à ce stade, qu’implique la création de dépôts centralisés. En fait, ceci correspond à une vision naïve qui laisse penser qu’à l’heure de l’Internet, il faille encore centraliser quoi que ce soit. L’élément centralisateur, c’est le moteur de recherche. Prenons Google Scholar: il est parfaitement efficace pour retrouver les articles dans l’ensemble des dépôts institutionnels, aussi bien que dans un dépôt central. L’utilité des dépôts centralisés n’est donc pas justifiable sur le plan technique. Le risque est même qu’ils ne solidifient uniquement que le dépôt des travaux faits avec les fonds d’un seul bailleur de fonds. Les dépôts institutionnels assurent la présence sur le web de tous les travaux scientifiques quels qu’ils soient, peu importe comment ils sont financés.

On peut comprendre que les bailleurs de fonds et organismes finançants aient envie de disposer d’un répertoire complet des travaux qu’ils subsidient, mais il est logique alors qu’ils collectent les données — c’est maintenant très aisé techniquement et cela nécessite juste un peu d’organisation pour être systématique — à partir des dépôts institutionnels plus complets ou que ces derniers leur communiquent automatiquement l’information.

Par ailleurs, la philosophie qui sous-tend l’Open Access est planétaire. Elle ne peut se confiner à une dimension européenne. La science est plus universelle que cela.

La création de dépôts centralisés n’est pas seulement une perte de temps, elle est aussi contre-productive pour la généralisation du dépôt obligatoire car elle multiplie, pour des chercheurs qui résistent déjà à déposer ne fût-ce qu’une fois leurs travaux, elle multiplie les endroits où ils doivent les déposer !

Nous sommes donc en présence d’une initiative de très bonne volonté, qui a du sens pour l’ESF, mais qui est un peu maladroite. Il eût été préférable de développer le principe que les dépôts centralisés soient des récoltants d’informations à partir des dépôts institutionnels et non des endroits de dépôt direct. Le principe même des dépôts thématiques (par sujet, par domaine de la science, par nationalité, par continent, par source de financement, etc.) ne peut qu’ajouter à la confusion dans un domaine qui n’est déjà pas facile à mettre en place et où le succès le plus complet est lié à la proximité du niveau de pouvoir et d’exigence. Les dépôts thématiques (ici, il serait doublement sectoriel: Europe & Biomédecine) ont beaucoup de sens, mais doivent rester secondaires par rapport à l’exigence fondamentale du “tout accessible”.

En d’autres termes, le succès de l’Open Access, sans se heurter de front aux éditeurs, repose sur les dépôts d’articles publiés par ailleurs et sur l’exigence d’un travail unique pour l’auteur. Le plus simple et le plus efficace pour cela est le dépôt institutionnel. Toute recherche provient d’institutions: le dépôt idéal le plus efficace et le plus complet ne peut donc être qu’institutionnel. Le reste est technique: ce n’est plus qu’une affaire de récolte d’informations.

La proposition de l’ESF n’est donc intéressante que si elle se situe au niveau de la récolte secondaire des données à partir des dépôts institutionnels primaires. Dans sa présentation actuelle, elle manque son but.

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SUMMARY: The answer to the question of whether longstanding Arxiv self-archivers need either change their locus of deposit or do double the keystrokes if they are to deposit their papers in both Arxiv and their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) is that this can now be accomplished automatically, depositing only once, thanks to the IR software's SWORD import/export functionality. A second question is whether central harvesters of distributed IRs can provide (at least) the same functionality as direct-deposit central repositories (or even better). The provisional reply is that they can, for example, by building the functionality on top of the Celestial OAI-PMH harvester. It is now important and timely to demonstrate this capability technically, in the service of OA's fundamental objective: Getting the OA IRs filled. The demonstration that central harvesting of distributed IR deposits can not only duplicate but surpass the functionality of direct central deposit should help encourage funders to adopt the convergent IR deposit mandates that facilitate the adoption of complementary mandates by the universal provider of research output: the worldwide network of institutions (OA's "sleeping giant") -- rather than divergent mandates that fail to encourage (or even discourage) institutional mandates.

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Physicist (anonymous):

"If you want to convince me [that institutional self-archiving plus central harvesting can provide all the functionality of Arxiv], then try to do so by conducting the following experiment with any... "harvesting" vehicles you like: 

    (1) Choose an area, such as Mathematical Physics, or Integrable Systems, and find all the papers that have been deposited in any of the archives that they cover, within the past week.  (If they cover 95% of the arXiv, they must necessarily producethis information just as well). No other barrage of junk; just that simple list of papers. 

    (2) Do the same with respect to all the posted publications by a given author for the past ten years. Again: not a barrage of google-like junk dumped upon you, but this specific information. (If I want a ton of junk, I can also go to Google scholar, and waste endless time trying to find what I need.) 

    (3) Find out, at one go, if a given article, or set of articles, from the above list,  has been published in a journal , and what the journal reference is.  

    (4) Get a copy of any of these articles, at once, in any convenient format, like .pdf, that is available.

    (5) Be equally sure that all the above is simultaneously done for all such articles deposited in individual institutional repositories.

"If you can do all the above, successfully, you will have given the 'proof of principle'."

Les Carr (ECS, Southampton):

"I think we can reasonably build the required functionality on top of the Celestial OAI-PMH harvester. The "proof of concept" project would need to fund a server to allow registered users to subscribe to alerting emails, based on searches over the "recently added" OAI metadata held in Celestial." 

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Note: This is not about the relatively trivial issue of whether longstanding Arxiv self-archivers need either to change their locus of deposit or to do double the keystrokes in order to deposit their papers in both Arxiv and their IRs: That can be accomplished automatically, depositing only once, by the IR software's SWORD import/export functionality. 

This is instead about whether central harvesters of distributed IRs can indeed provide (at least) the same functionality as direct-deposit central repositories (or even better). The provisional reply is that they can, but it is now important and timely to demonstrate this technically.

The functionality question is extremely important for another matter: Getting the IRs filled. It has become clear that deposit mandates are needed in order to fill repositories (whether central or institutional) with OA's target content: the 2.5 million articles per year published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, in all disciplines and languages, and originating from all the world's research institutions (universities, mostly).

OA deposits need to be mandated by all the world's research institutions, the research providers, reinforced by deposit mandates from the funders of the funded subportion of that research. The universal adoption of these deposit mandates needs to be facilitated and accelerated: There have only been 61 adopted so far (from 31 institutions and 30 funders). The institutional mandates cover all research output, whereas the funder mandates only cover funded research. But whereas an institutional mandate covers all research output, cutting across all fields, funded and unfunded, from that institution alone, a funder mandate covers only funded research, usually only in one or a few fields; however, it cuts across many institutions. 

Hence a funder mandate that requires institutional IR deposit (followed by optional automatized central harvesting or export) also simultaneously serves to stimulate, motivate and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates by each of its funded institutions, to cover the rest of each institution's own research output, across all fields, funded and unfunded. In contrast, a funder mandate that requires direct deposit in an institution-external, central repository (1) touches only the research output that it funds, (2) fails to propagate so as to facilitate the adoption of complementary institutional mandates for all the rest of institutional research output -- and even (3) competes with institutional mandates by (giving the appearance of) necessitating double-deposit were the institution to contemplate adopting a deposit mandate of its own too. 

In reality, of course, the SWORD automatic import/export capability moots any need for double-deposit, but this is not yet widely known or understood; and even without double-deposit as a perceived deterrent, divergent funder mandates, needlessly requiring direct institution-external deposit, simply miss the opportunity to provide the synergy and incentive for the adoption of complementary institutional mandates that convergent funder mandates, requiring institutional IR deposit (plus optional central harvesting) do.

Hence the demonstration that central harvesting of distributed IR deposits can not only duplicate but surpass the functionality of direct central deposit should help encourage funders to adopt the convergent IR deposit mandates that facilitate the adoption of complementary mandates by the universal provider of research output, the worldwide network of institutions (OA's "sleeping giant"), rather than divergent mandates that fail to encourage (or even discourage) institutional mandates.

"Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally"

"Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: An Indiana University study (on the Institutional Repository of the University of Southampton) by Xia (2008) has tested the hypothesis that physicists who already habitually self-archive in an Open Access (OA) Central Repository (Arxiv) would be more likely to self-archive in their own institution's OA Institutional Repository (IR). The outcome of the study was that the hypothesis is incorrect: If anything, veteran Arxiv self-archivers are more resistant to IR deposit than ordinary nonarchivers, because they neither wish to change their longstanding locus of deposit, nor do they wish to double-deposit.
   This outcome is quite natural and to be expected. The solution for this relatively small population of seasoned self-archivers is for their institution-external deposits to be automatically imported back into their IRs using the SWORD protocol (which can also be used to export automatically from IRs to central repositories). There is no need for veteran self-archivers to change their practices or to double-deposit.
   It is not the 15% of authors who already self-archive (whether institution-externally or on their own institutional websites) that are the problem for OA: The problem is the 85% who do not yet self-archive. It is in order to set the keystrokes of those nonarchivers in motion at long last -- for their own benefit and that of their employing institutions as well as the tax-paying public that funds their research -- that Green OA self-archiving mandates are now being adopted by their institutions and funders.
   When researchers have been polled (by Alma Swan & Sheridan Brown), the vast majority (95%), across all fields, have responded that they would comply with self-archiving mandates by their institutions and/or their funders (over 80% of them reporting that they would comply willingly). And actual outcome studies (by Arthur Sale) have confirmed that this is indeed what happens, with near-100% self-archiving rates reached within about two years once mandated -- but continuing to languish at the baseline 15% self-archiving rate (30% with incentives ad assistance) if left unmandated.

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Xia, J. (2008) A Comparison of Subject and Institutional Repositories in Self-archiving Practices. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34 (6):489-495.

(1) The Xia (2008) study's finding is quite correct that many more Southampton physicists self-archive centrally in Arxiv rather than institutionally in Southamtpon University's Institutional Repository (IR). If the same study had been conducted at any other university, the outcome would almost certainly have been identical. The reason is that physicists have been self-archiving centrally in Arxiv since 1991, and today, quite understandably, they have no desire either to switch to local IR self-archiving or to do double-depositing.

(2) This was already known at Southampton, and other institutions know it about their own physicists.

(3) Consequently, it is not at clear why anyone would have expected the opposite result, namely, that longstanding Arxiv self-archivers would be quite happy to switch to local IR self-archiving, or to do double-depositing!

(4) In reality, the problem -- for both OA and for IRs -- is not the physicists who are already self-archiving, regardless of where they are self-archiving. If all researchers were doing what the physicists have been doing since 1991 (and computer scientists have been doing since even earlier), 100% OA would be long behind us, and IRs could all be filled, if we wished, trivially, by simply importing back all their own institution-external deposits, automatically, using something like the SWORD protocol.

(5) The real problem is hence not the minority of spontaneous self-archivers of long standing (globally, spontaneous self-archiving overall hovers at about 15% overall); the problem is the vast majority, which consists of nonarchivers: Of OA's target content -- the annual 2.5 million articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines and institutions -- 85% is not yet being self-archived. It is for that reason that self-archiving mandates have proved to be necessary.

(6) In choosing to analyze the data on Southampton -- which is indeed a hotbed of OA, OA IRs, OA self-archiving, and OA self-archiving mandates -- this study has unfortunately chosen to analyze the wrong IR and the wrong mandate! It is Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) that has the planet's first and longest standing self-archiving mandate (since 2002-2003), and it is the ECS IR that has a full-text deposit rate near 100%. 

(7) The 2008 study analyzed the self-archiving rate for physicists, in the university-wide IR. But the University as a whole only has a university-wide mandate (and a rather vague one) since April 2008, and even that has not yet been publicized or implemented yet. (The university did have a longer standing requirement to enter metadata in the IR for the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), mostly by library proxy deposit, which is why the study found so many abstracts without full texts therein, for there was no requirement to deposit the full text.)

(8) As a consequence, the study's findings -- although quite accurate regarding the general resistance of veteran Arxiv self-archivers to self-archiving alternatively or additionally in their own institution's IR -- do not really have any bearing on mandates and mandated IR behavior in general.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The JISC/SIRIS "Report of the Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions Study" (November 2008) "was commissioned by JISC to produce a set of practical recommendations for steps that can be taken to improve the interactions between institutional and subject repositories in the UK" but it fails to make clear the single most important reason why Institutional Repositories' "desired ‘critical mass’ of content is far from having been achieved."

The following has been repeatedly demonstrated (1) in cross-national, cross-disciplinary surveys (by Alma Swan, uncited in the report) on what authors state that they will and won't do and (2) in outcome studies (by Arthur Sale, likewise uncited in the report) that confirm the survey findings, reporting what authors actually do:

Most authors will not deposit until and unless their universities and/or their funders make deposit mandatory. But if and when deposit is made mandatory, over 80% will deposit, and deposit willingly. (A further 15% will deposit reluctantly, and 5% will not comply with the mandate at all.) In contrast, the spontaneous (unmandated) deposit rate is and remains at about 15%, for years now (and adding incentives and assistance but no mandate only raises this deposit rate to about 30%).

The JISC/SIRIS report merely states: "Whether deposit of content is mandatory is a decision that will be made by each institution," but it does not even list the necessity of mandating deposit as one of its recommendations, even though it is the crucial determinant of whether or not the institutional repository ever manages to attract its target content.

Nor does the JISC/SIRIS report indicate how institutional and funder mandates reinforce one another, nor how to make both mandates and locus of deposit systematically convergent and complementary (deposit institutionally, harvest centrally) rather than divergent and competitive -- though surely that is the essence of "Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions."

There are now 58 deposit mandates already adopted worldwide (28 from universties/faculties, including Southampton, Glasgow, Liège, Harvard and Stanford, and 30 from funders, including 6/7 Research Councils UK, European Research Council and the US National Institutes of Health) plus at least 11 known mandate proposals pending (including a unanimous recommendation from the European Universities Association council, for its 791 member universities in 46 countries, plus a recommendation to the European Commission from the European Heads of Research Councils).

It is clear now that mandated OA self-archiving is the way that the world will reach universal OA at long last. Who will lead and who will follow will depend on who grasps this, at long last, and takes the initiative. Otherwise, there's not much point in giving or taking advice on the interactions of empty repositories...

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O’Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40.

Swan A, Needham P, Probets P, Muir A, O 'Brien A, Oppenheim C, Hardy R and Rowland F (2004). Delivery, management and access model for E-prints and open access journals within further and higher education Report of JISC study. pp 1-121.

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On 30-Nov-08, at 9:08 AM, Neil Jacobs (JISC) replied in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

"Thanks Stevan,

You're right, of course, the report does not cover policies. The brief for the work was to look for practical ways that subject/funder and institutional repositories can work together within the constraints of the current policies of their host organisations. There are discussions to be had at the policy level, but we felt that there were also practical things to be done now, without waiting for that."

Hi Neil,

I was referring to the JISC report's recommendations, which mention a number of things, but not how to get the repositories filled (despite noting the problem that they are empty).

It seems to me that the practical problems of what to do with -- and how to work together with -- empty repositories are trumped by the practical problem of how to get the repositories filled.

Moreover, the solution to the practical problem of how the repositories (both institutional and subject/funder) can work together is by no means independent of the practical problem of how to get them filled -- including the all-important question of the locus of direct deposit:

The crucial question (for both policy and practice) is whether direct deposit is to be divergent and competitive (as it is now, being sometimes institutional and sometimes central) or convergent and synergistic (as it can and ought to be), by systematically mandating convergent institutional deposit, mutually reinforced by both institutional and funder mandates, followed by central harvesting -- rather than divergent, competing mandates requiring deposits willy-nilly, resulting in confusion, understandable resistance to divergent or double deposit, and, most important, the failure to capitalize on funder mandates so as to reinforce institutional mandates.

Institutions, after all, are the producers of all refereed research output, in all subjects, and whether funded or unfunded. Get all those institutions to provide OA to all their own refereed research output, and you have 100% OA (and all the central harvests from it that you like).

As it stands, however, funder and institutional mandates are pulling researchers needlessly in divergent directions. And (many) funder mandates in particular, instead of adding their full weight behind the drive to get all refereed research to be made OA, are thinking, parochially, only of their own funded fiefdom, by arbitrarily insisting on direct deposit in central repositories that could easily harvest instead from the institutional repositories, if convergent institutional deposit were mandated by all -- with the bonus that all research, and all institutions, would be targeted by all mandates.

It is not too late to fix this. It is still early days. There is no need to take the status quo for granted, especially given that most repositories are still empty.

I hope the reply will not be the usual (1) "What about researchers whose institutions still don't have IRs?": Let those author's deposit provisionally in DEPOT for now, from which they can be automatically exported to their IRs as soon as they are created, using the SWORD protocol. With all mandates converging systematically on IRs, you can be sure that this will greatly facilitate and accelerate both IR creation and IR deposit mandate adoption. But with just unfocussed attempts to accommodate to the recent, random, and unreflecting status quo, all that is guaranteed is to perpetuate it.

Nor is the right reply (2) "Since all repositories, institutional and subject/funder, are OAI-interoperable, it doesn't matter where authors deposit!" Yes, they are interoperable, and yes, it would not matter where authors deposited -- if they were indeed all depositing in one or the other. But most authors are not depositing, and that is the point. Moreover, most institutions are not mandating deposit at all yet and that is the other point. Funder mandates can help induce institutions -- the universal research providers -- to create IRs and to adopt institutional deposit mandates if the funder mandates are convergent on IR deposit. But funder mandates have the opposite effect if they instead insist on central deposit. So the fact that both types of repository are interoperable is beside the point.

Une puce à l'oreille (not to be confused with a gadfly),

Stevan

The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

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

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

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Ian Stuart (IS) and Charles Oppenheim (CO) added, in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

IS: "Is [it] strictly true [that 'Institutions, after all, are the producers of all refereed research output, in all subjects, and whether funded or unfunded.']? My understanding was that, particularly on the social sciences arena, a number of academics continue to write & publish, even though they have retired. No? (another example of research output that requires the like of the Depot for an OA deposit service...)"

CO: "Ian is correct, especdially in the humanities. Also, there is a large amount of STM scholarly output that comes from industry, especially the pharmaceutical industry."

Yes, both "problems" are trivially easily solved, and neither is an exception to the fact that both institutional and funder deposit mandates need to be systematically convergent -- on institutional repository (IR) deposit -- rather than arbitrarily divergent (on willy-nilly institutional and funder/subject repository deposit):

(1) The drivers of universal OA are institutional and funder mandates. So, by definition, a retired author, institutionally unaffiliated and unfunded, cannot be mandated to deposit! But if they are minded to deposit (as they certainly will be, as OA becomes universal thanks to OA mandates), they can deposit in back-up repositories like the UK's DEPOT. (So, yes, DEPOT and similar back-up repositories elsewhere are an excellent resource for tiding over authors who do not have institutions, or whose institutions do not yet have IRs.)

(2) Or retired academics can deposit in the IR of their former institution: Universities not only have a long tradition of providing facilities for their retired academics, but they have a special interest, now, in showcasing their past and present research output. Whether officially "emeritus" or not, the research output of their own retired staff certainly falls within that ambit. (At UQAM, for example, retired faculty officially retain the right to deposit their publications in UQAM's IR.)

(3) Universities also have a tradition of providing facilities, where possible, for unaffiliated academics. So, given that all IRs are interoperable, and given that we are talking about published, peer-reviewed research articles, a university tradition will quite naturally evolve for IRs to host the publications of unaffiliated scholars and scientists in need of a repository to make their published work OA.

(4) The pharmaceutical industry may well be secretive about its unpublished research, but it has exactly the same interest as all other research institutions in providing access to its own published research (that's why they publish it!) -- and in gaining access to the published research of other institutions. Hence it is likely that the R&D wing of pharmaceutical companies (and other industrial research producers) will have IRs and IR mandates of their own, as the movement toward universal OA grows. (And where not, other institutional hosts or DEPOT will provide the natural solution.)

Again, I have to remind us all that the glaring and pressing immediate problem today is gapingly empty IRs where they are fully available to all their institutional authors, who are simply not depositing of their own accord ("Zeno's Paralysis"). The problem is not a press of authors desperate to deposit, but having no place to do so!

And the solution is institutional and funder deposit mandates, converging on the IRs of the universal providers of all research, in all subjects, funded and unfunded: the institutions (mostly universities, partly independent research institutions, partly the R&D of commercial institutions).

We should not now be fretting about borderline cases and putative exceptions whilst we still have not yet taken the obvious and long overdue steps needed to take care of the mainstay.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Two articles [with which I could hardly agree more!] by France's OA pioneer, Hélène Bosc: -- SH

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Bosc, H, (2008) [in French]
L’auto-archivage en France : deux exemples de politiques différentes et leurs résultats 
[Self-Archiving in France: Two Different Policies and Their Results]
Liinc em Revista, 4 (2): 196-217 
   
ABSTRACT (in English: French abstract below): In France, the first Institutional Repositories (IRs) were set up in 2002, using the E-Prints software. At the same time, a centralized repository was organized by CNRS, a French multidisciplinary research institute, for the deposit of all French research output. In 2006, most of the French scientific and scholarly research organisations signed a “Protocol of Agreement” to collaborate in the development of this national archive, HAL. Independently, the Ifremer Research Institute launched its own IR (Archimer) in 2005. We have compared the development of HAL and Archimer. Our results show that Ifremer’s policy of self-archiving has resulted in 80% of its research output being made Open Access (OA). In the same time interval, HAL, lacking a self-archiving mandate, had only 10% of its target research output deposited. Ifremer’s specific implementation of its mandate (a staff dedicated to self-archiving) is probably not affordable for most French research institutions but its self-archiving mandate itself is, and Arthur Sale’s comparative studies in Australia have shown that the essential element is the mandate itself. The European Universities Association, mindful of the benefits of mandating OA, has recommended self-archiving mandates for its 791 universities. Self-archiving mandates have already been adopted by 22 universities and research institutions worldwide (including Harvard, Southampton, CERN, and one CNRS research laboratory) as well as 22 research funding agencies (including NIH, ERC, & RCUK). OA maximizes research usage and impact. It is time for each of the universities and research institutions of France to adopt their own OA self-archiving mandates.

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Bosc, H. (2008) (preprint; in French)
Le droit des chercheurs à mettre leurs résultats de recherche en libre accès : appropriation des archives ouvertes par différentes communautés dans le monde
[Researchers' Right to Self-Archive Their Articles In Open Access Repositories: Evolving Policy Worldwide]

ABSTRACT (in English: French abstract below): In 2002, a group of researchers, librarians and publishers, launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), formulating the concept of Open Access (OA) as well as the two strategies for achieving it – OA self-archiving (BOAI-1, “Green OA”) and OA publishing (BOAI-2, “Gold OA”). The concept of OA spread rapidly among researchers and research policy-makers, but was at first equated almost completely with Gold OA publishing alone, neglecting Green OA self-archiving, despite the fact that it is Green OA that has the greatest immediate scope for growth. After considerable countervailing effort in the form of strategic analysis, research impact and outcome studies, and the development of technical tools for creating OA archives (or  “Institutional Repositories” IRs) and measuring their impact, the importance and power of Green OA has been demonstrated and recognised, and with it has come a growing number of IRs and the adoption of mandatory OA self-archiving policies by universities, research institutions and research funders. In some countries OA self-archiving policies have even been debated and proposed at the governmental level. This strong engagement in Green OA by policy makers has begun to alarm journal publishers, who are now lobbying vigorously against OA, successfully slowing or halting legislation in some cases. It is for this reason that the research community itself – not vulnerable to publisher lobbying as politicians are – is now taking the initiative in OA policy-making, mandating self-archiving at the university level.

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L’auto-archivage en France: deux exemples de politiques différentes et leurs résultats
      Résumé: Les premières archives ouvertes se sont développées en France, en 2002 avec le logiciel E-Prints. Dans ce même temps une archive centralisée, à vocation nationale (HAL)1 a été mise en place par le CNRS. En 2006, la plupart des institutions de recherche française ont adhéré au projet HAL et se sont engagées à participer au développement de cette archive en signant un « protocole d’accord ». Presque au même moment, en 2005, un organisme de recherche l'Ifremer a mis en place une archive institutionnelle (Archimer)2 indépendamment de HAL. Nous avons comparé le développement de HAL et celui d’Archimer. Les résultats montrent que la politique de l’Ifremer permet de mettre en Libre Accès (LA) 80% la production « majeure » de l’organisme. HAL qui n’a pas été accompagnée de mesures fortes ne met en LA qu’environ 10% de la production française. Les moyens mis par l’Ifremer (financement de postes dédiés à l’autoarchivage) ne peuvent sans doute pas être pris par toutes les institutions de recherche françaises mais celles-ci peuvent exiger que leurs chercheurs déposent eux-mêmes leurs documents dans une archive -les études d’Arthur Sale ayant montré que l’obligation de dépôt est l’élément essentiel de la réussite d’une archive. L’Association des Universités Européennes (UEA) qui a vu tout l’intérêt de cette obligation pour le chercheur et pour son organisme, soutient cette démarche. Cette obligation a déjà été adoptée par plusieurs institutions de recherche dans le monde (entre autres Harvard, Southampton, le CERN et un laboratoire du CNRS) tout comme 27 fondations qui subventionnent la recherche (parmi lesquelles les NIH, l’ECR, les RCUK, et l'ANR en France). Le Libre Accès permet une meilleure utilisation de la recherche et augmente son impact. Les universités françaises et les organismes de recherche pour tirer profit de tous ces avantages, doivent maintenant obliger le dépôt de leur production.

Le droit des chercheurs à mettre leurs résultats de recherche en libre accès : appropriation des archives ouvertes par différentes communautés dans le monde
      Résumé: Le développement d'Internet a permis à la communauté scientifique de prendre conscience de son droit : celui de mettre en libre accès ses propres résultats de recherche. En 2002, un groupe de chercheurs et éditeurs a lancé la Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Il a formulé le concept du libre accès (LA) et les deux stratégies pour y parvenir : déposer dans une archive ouverte le double d'un article publié dans un périodique payé par souscription (« LA Vert »), et/ou publier dans une revue en libre accès (« LA Doré »). Le concept du libre accès s'est rapidement étendu mais il a d'abord été presque complètement assimilé au seul « LA Doré ». L'auto-archivage a été négligé en dépit du fait que cette voie verte représente la possibilité de croissance du LA la plus immédiate et la plus rapide. Les efforts déployés alors (analyses stratégiques, études, développement d'outils techniques pour créer des archives institutionnelles et mesurer leur impact) ont permis de démontrer l'importance et les avantages de l'auto-archivage. De ce fait le nombre d'archives a augmenté, tout comme l'obligation d'auto-archiver dans les universités, les institutions et les fondations de recherche. Dans quelques pays, une politique d'auto-archivage a été proposée au niveau gouvernemental. Cet engagement des hommes politiques commence à inquiéter certains éditeurs scientifiques, qui s'organisent en lobby anti-LA et réussissent dans certains cas à ralentir ou arrêter la législation. C'est pour cette raison que la communauté scientifique, moins vulnérable au lobby des éditeurs - que peuvent l'être les politiciens - prend l'initiative d'organiser une politique de LA avec l'obligation d'auto-archivage au niveau de l'université.

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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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The following is an expanded, hyperlinked version of a BMJ critique of:

Davis, PN, Lewenstein, BV, Simon, DH, Booth, JG, & Connolly, MJL (2008) Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial British Medical Journal 337: a568

Overview (by SH):

Davis et al.'s study was designed to test whether the "Open Access (OA) Advantage" (i.e., more citations to OA articles than to non-OA articles in the same journal and year) is an artifact of a "self-selection bias" (i.e., better authors are more likely to self-archive or better articles are more likely to be self-archived by their authors).

The control for self-selection bias was to select randomly which articles were made OA, rather than having the author choose. The result was that a year after publication the OA articles were not cited significantly more than the non-OA articles (although they were downloaded more).

The authors write:

"To control for self selection we carried out a randomised controlled experiment in which articles from a journal publisher’s websites were assigned to open access status or subscription access only"

The authors conclude:

"No evidence was found of a citation advantage for open access articles in the first year after publication. The citation advantage from open access reported widely in the literature may be an artefact of other causes."

Commentary:

To show that the OA advantage is an artefact of self-selection bias (or of any other factor), you first have to produce the OA advantage and then show that it is eliminated by eliminating self-selection bias (or any other artefact).

This is not what Davis et al. did. They simply showed that they could detect no OA advantage one year after publication in their sample. This is not surprising, since most other studies, some based based on hundreds of thousands of articles, don't detect an OA advantage one year after publication either. It is too early.

To draw any conclusions at all from such a 1-year study, the authors would have had to do a control condition, in which they managed to find a sufficient number of self-selected, self-archived OA articles (from the same journals, for the same year) that do show the OA advantage, whereas their randomized OA articles do not. In the absence of that control condition, the finding that no OA advantage is detected in the first year for this particular sample of 247 out of 1619 articles in 11 physiological journals is completely uninformative.

The authors did find a download advantage within the first year, as other studies have found. This early download advantage for OA articles has also been found to be correlated with a citation advantage 18 months or more later. The authors try to argue that this correlation would not hold in their case, but they give no evidence (because they hurried to publish their study, originally intended to run four years, three years too early.)

(1) The Davis study was originally proposed (in December 2006) as intended to cover 4 years:

Davis, PN (2006) Randomized controlled study of OA publishing (see comment) 

It has instead been released after a year.

(2) The Open Access (OA) Advantage (i.e., significantly more citations for OA articles, always comparing OA and non-OA articles in the same journal and year) has been reported in all fields tested so far, for example:

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.

(3) There is always the logical possibility that the OA advantage is not a causal one, but merely an effect of self-selection: The better authors may be more likely to self-archive their articles and/or the better articles may be more likely to be self-archived; those better articles would be the ones that get more cited anyway.

(4) So it is a very good idea to try to control methodologically for this self-selection bias: The way to control it is exactly as Davis et al. have done, which is to select articles at random for being made OA, rather than having the authors self-select.

(5) Then, if it turns out that the citation advantage for randomized OA articles is significantly smaller than the citation advantage for self-selected-OA articles, the hypothesis that the OA advantage is all or mostly just a self-selection bias is supported.

(6) But that is not at all what Davis et al. did.

(7) All Davis et al. did was to find that their randomized OA articles had significantly higher downloads than non-OA articles, but no significant difference in citations.

(8) This was based on the first year after publication, when most of the prior studies on the OA advantage likewise find no significant OA advantage, because it is simply too early: the early results are too noisy! The OA advantage shows up in later years (1-4).

(9) If Davis et al. had been more self-critical, seeking to test and perhaps falsify their own hypothesis, rather than just to confirm it, they would have done the obvious control study, which is to test whether articles that were made OA through self-selected self-archiving by their authors (in the very same year, in the very same journals) show an OA advantage in that same interval. For if they do not, then of course the interval was too short, the results were released prematurely, and the study so far shows nothing at all: It is not until you have actually demonstrated an OA advantage that you can estimate how much of that advantage might in reality be due to a self-selection artefact!

(10) The study shows almost nothing at all, but not quite nothing, because one would expect (based on our own previous study, which showed that early downloads, at 6 months, predict enhanced citations at a year and a half or later) that Davis's increased downloads too would translate into increased citations, once given enough time.

Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2006) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 57(8) pp. 1060-1072.

(11) The findings of Michael Kurtz and collaborators are also relevant in this regard. They looked only at astrophysics, which is special, in that (a) it is a field with only about a dozen journals, to which every research-active astronomer has subscription access -- these days they also have free online access via ADS -- and (b) it is a field in which most authors self-archive their preprints very early in arxiv -- much earlier than the date of publication.

Kurtz, M. J. and Henneken, E. A. (2007) Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal. Preprint deposited in arXiv September 6, 2007.

(12) Kurtz & Henneken, too, found the usual self-archiving advantage in astrophysics (i.e., about twice as many citations for OA papers than non-OA), but when they analyzed its cause, they found that most of the cause was the Early Advantage of access to the preprint, as much as a year before publication of the (OA) postprint. In addition, they found a self-selection bias (for prepublication preprints -- which is all that were involved here, because, as noted, in astrophysics, after publication, everything is OA): The better articles by the better authors were more likely to have been self-archived as preprints.

(13) Kurtz's results do not generalize to all fields, because it is not true of other fields either that (a) they already have 100% OA for their published postprints, or that (b) many authors tend to self-archive preprints before publication.

(14) However, the fact that early preprint self-archiving (in a field that is 100% OA as of postprint publication) is sufficient to double citations is very likely to translate into a similar effect, in a non-OA, non-preprint-archiving field, if one reckons on the basis of the one-year access embargo that many publishers are imposing on the postprint. (The yearlong "No-Embargo" advantage provided by postprint OA in other fields might not turn out to be so big as to double citations, as the preprint Early Advantage in astrophysics does, because any potential prepublication advantage is lost, and after publication there is at least the subscription access to the postprint; but the postpublication counterpart of the Early Advantage for postprints that are either not self-archived or embargoed is likely to be there too.)

(15) Moreover, the preprint OA advantage is primarily Early Advantage, and only secondarily Self-Selection.

(16) The size of the postprint self-selection bias would have been what Davis et al. tested -- if they had done the proper control, and waited long enough to get an actual OA effect to compare against. (Their regression analyses simply show that exactly as they detected no citation advantage in their sample and interval for the random OA articles, they likewise likewise detected no citation advantage for the self-selected self-archived OA articles in their sample and interval: this hardly constitutes evidence that the (undetected) OA advantage is in reality a self-selection artefact!)

(17) We had reported in an unpublished 2007 pilot study that there was no statistically significant difference between the size of the OA advantage for mandated (i.e., obligatory) and unmandated (i.e., self-selected) self-archiving:

Hajjem, C & Harnad, S. (2007) The Open Access Citation Advantage: Quality Advantage Or Quality Bias? Preprint deposited in arXiv January 22, 2007. 

(18) We will soon be reporting the results of a 4-year study on the OA advantage in mandated and unmandated self-archiving that confirms these earlier findings: Mandated self-archiving is like Davis et al.'s randomized OA, but we find that it does not reduce the OA advantage at all -- once enough time has elapsed for there to be an OA Advantage at all. 

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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

OUP's post-print policy is:

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Guenther Eysenbach suggests that what should be mandated (by institututions and funders) is not Green OA self-archiving but Gold OA publishing, because it would be more efficient and less costly. I explain below why neither of these is the case now (but that Green OA mandates may indeed pave the way for an eventual transition to Gold OA that will be less costly and more efficient).

Parallel Publishing?
    (1) There is no parallel publishing with Green OA self-archiving.
    (2) Publishing (whether Gold OA or non-OA) is publishing.
    (3) Green OA is access provision (to published articles), not publishing (of already-published articles).
    (4) A posted, unpublished document is not listed in an academic CV as "published," and a published article that is also posted (or emailed, or photocopied) is not listed as two publications.
    (5) Users cite the published article, not the access-source; where available, they also list the URL(s) for access purposes.

Society pays twice?
    (1) Who pays twice for what?
    (2) Tax-payers pay to fund research.
    (3) Institutions pay to subscribe to the journals in which the research is published.
    (4) No institution can afford to subscribe to all (refereed) journals; most can afford only a few.
    (5) So OA is needed so that all users can access all articles.
    (6) Green OA self-archiving supplements what is currently accessible to subscribers, by making it accessible to all would-be users, webwide.
    (7) So who is paying for what, twice, with Green OA?
    (8) Even with Gold OA today, no one would be paying twice.
    (9) But hybrid "open choice" (optional gold) publishers would be paid twice -- once from institutional subscription money, and once from research grant money.
    (10) If and when universal Green OA causes universal subscription cancellations, all journals can downsize to Gold OA, paid for by redirecting part of the windfall institutional cancellation savings rather than by redirecting scarce research funds from research.

Mandate gold OA and "pay once"?
    (1) No one is paying twice.
    (2) Institutions and funders cannot mandate publishers' choice of cost-recovery model.
    (3) Institutions and funders cannot mandate authors' choice of journals.
    (4) Until and unless subscriptions are cancelled, Gold OA requires extra funds, usually diverted from research.
    (5) Green OA can provide immediate 100% OA.
    (6) It just needs to be mandated by institutions and funders.

Pay for Gold OA by "Topping up" research grants?
    (1) Topping up from what funds?
    (2) Research is already underfunded and research funds are scarce.
    (3) Redirecting research funds to pay needlessly for Gold OA publishing today just makes research funds scarcer, needlessly, because providing Green OA costs nothing, and subscriptions are still paying the costs of publishing.

Canada's CIHR Mandate without "infrastructure"?
    (1) What infrastucture?
    (2) Researchers whose institutions already have an OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR) can deposit there.
    (3) For researchers that do not yet have an IR there are many back-up central repositories in which they can deposit, such as DEPOT, CogPrints, or Arxiv, all OAI-interoperable.
    (4) What is lacking is deposits, not repositories to deposit in -- and the mandates will cure that.
    (5) There is no need for a "Canada PubMed Central" as a locus of direct deposit.
    (6) Central repositories can harvest from Institutional Repositories, through OAI interoperability.

Self-archiving is not free?
    (1) Not free to whom?
    (2) And to whom does it cost what?
    (3) Institutions create repositories (for many reasons: record-keeping, performance assessment, access-provision, visibility).
    (4) The cost to the institution per paper deposited is a few dollars.
    (5) The cost to the researcher per paper deposited is a few keystrokes.

Can subscription savings pay for repository costs?
    (1) Institutional repository costs per paper deposited are negligibly small.
    (2) Central repository costs are up to those who think central repositories are needed, over and above OAI-interoperable institutional repositories.
    (3) None of this has anything to do with publication costs or Gold OA fees.
    (4) Today Gold OA fees per paper are not negligibly small, and they divert scarce funds from research.
    (5) If and when Green OA causes subscriptions to become unsustainable, journals will cut costs by abandoning the paper edition and PDF-generation, offloading access-provision and archiving onto the distributed institutional repository network, downsizing to peer review alone, and converting to the Gold OA cost-recovery model -- paid for, per paper, by institutions' annual windfall savings from having cancelled journal subscriptions.

How much does it cost to run a Repository?
    (1) Per deposited paper, next to nothing.
    (2) And institutions derive many benefits from their IRs, having nothing to do with journal subscription costs one way or the other.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Talat Chaudhri and I agree that Green OA via self-archiving is feasible and desirable, and that publication will eventually consist of peer review alone. The only points of disagreement are about how to get there from here. I advocate Green OA mandates, whereas Talat advocates direct transition to peer-review-only, administered by university consortia. What Talat does not explain, however, is how we are to get the 25,000 journal titles that are currently being published by their current publishers to migrate to (or be replaced by) such consortia. Nor does Talat explain how the consortia's true peer-review expenses would be paid for, even if the 25K journals titles did miraculously migrate to such consortia of their own accord (although the answer even then is obvious: via Gold OA author-institution fees, paid out of their subscription cancellation savings).

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Talat Chaudhri, Repository Advisor, Aberystwyth University, wrote (in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

TC: "Gold OA [1] isn't popular and, I suspect, [2] never will be."

Talat Chaudhri is right about the first point [1], and the reason is partly the current price of Gold OA and partly the fact that Gold OA is not yet necessary, because Green OA (self-archiving) can provide OA.

But whether the price of Gold OA once it amounts to nothing more than the cost of peer review will be "popular" [2] -- if and when it becomes a necessity (i.e., if and when universal Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable) -- is not a matter of either popularity or suspicion: As long as peer review is necessary, paying the true costs of implementing it will be necessary, if one wants to publish (peer-reviewed research) at all.

The good news is that the cost per paper of peer review alone then will be far less than the cost per paper of (subscription) publishing now, and the subscription cancellations will release many times the amount of money needed to pay for peer review alone.

For the perplexed reader: Talat and I are not disagreeing on most of these points. We both agree that Green OA via self-archiving is feasible and desirable, and that publication will eventually consist of peer review alone.

The only points of disagreement are about how to get there from here.

I advocate Green OA mandates, whereas Talat advocates direct transition to peer-review-only, administered by university consortia.

What Talat does not explain, however, is how we are to get the 25,000 journal titles that are currently being published by their current publishers to migrate to (or be replaced by) such consortia.

Nor does Talat explain how the consortia's true peer-review expenses would be paid for, even if the 25K journals titles did, mirabile dictu, migrate to such consortia of their own accord (although the answer even then is obvious: via Gold OA author-institution fees, paid out of their subscription cancellation savings).

But apart from not wanting to call this sort of payment "Gold OA" (even though that's exactly what it is!), Talat also does not like Green OA mandates.

The trouble is that Talat has no better way -- nor even an equally good alternative way -- to get the 2.5 million articles published annually in the 2.5K journals to "migrate" to their authors' Green OA IRs -- any more than he has a way of getting the university peer review consortia created, or of getting the journal titles to migrate over to (or be replaced by) them.

So let's focus on the substantive points of agreement: (1) Universal Green OA and (2) publishing costs reduced to just peer review alone. Talat can leave the problem of generating that Green OA to the Green OA mandates, and he can call the funding of the peer review something other than "Gold OA" if he likes -- it all comes to the same thing anyway...

TC: "On "downsizing" to Gold OA, I'm afraid that I agree with the original point in the [Letter to Nature] to which N. Miradon posted a link recently. The developing world doesn't want it."

Reply: Downsizing is for publishers (not researchers) to do, under Green OA cancellation pressure. The only thing the developing world need do is to provide Green OA to its own article output by self-archiving the accepted, refereed final drafts (postprints) in their Institutional Repositories (IRs) (which is exactly the same thing that the developed world needs to do).

TC: "Neither, I submit, does anybody in the developed world want to pay for it."

They needn't. They need only mandate and provide Green OA. The rest will take care of itself. Institutions are already paying for publication (via subscriptions). When they no longer have to pay for subscriptions by the incoming journal, institutions' savings will be more than enough to pay for peer review by the outgoing article instead.

TC: "In terms of diverting currently subscription funds progressively to OA, any librarian such as myself will tell you that getting management agreement for what looks to them like a hypothetical new publishing model is going to be complex and very possibly unworkable, leaving only the few universities that have created funds for the purpose. None to my knowledge has agreed to allocate money on a yearly basis, as the costs are currently unknown."

But I have not said anything whatsoever about libraries needing to progressively divert subscription funds to OA.

I said universities and funders should mandate and provide OA (as 44 universities and funders, including Southampton and Harvard, ERC and NIH have done) and that IF and WHEN that should ever make subscriptions unsustainable (i.e., they are all cancelled), THEN a small portion of their windfall institutional savings can and will be redirected to pay for peer review.

No one is asking libraries to divert anything anywhere now, instantaneously or progressively. (If and when the time of universal, unsustainable cancellations comes, Necessity will be the Mother of Invention. No need to speculate or counterspeculate about it in our imaginations now, pre-emptively; let's just concentrate on mandating and providing universal Green OA.)

TC: "Why will Gold OA not catch on? Because it is unjust! Only those academics whose institutions can afford to pay will be able to publish, unlike the present situation where anybody can."

You are talking about Gold OA now, Talat, at current asking prices, and I agree.

So focus instead on mandating and providing Green OA for now, and worry about the question of converting to Gold OA if and when it becomes an actual matter of necessity, not just a hypothetical matter of possibility. (By that time the asking price will be so low, and the cancellation savings so high, that the decision will become a no-brainer.)

TC: "As I am presently a librarian, not an academic, I would be very likely unable to publish in my field of research on the basis of these centrally allocated funds, like retired academics and those in the developing world. Nobody will want this model, quite simply. They don't want it now!"

To repeat, you are thinking of Gold OA today, at today's asking prices, while all the money that can potentially pay for it is still tied up in paying the subscriptions. This is unilluminating and irrelevant: Forget about Gold OA if you wish. Publish wherever you like, self-archive your postprint, and let nature take care of the rest,

(Once Green OA is universal and only peer review needs to be paid for, the cost will be low enough so these needless hypothetical worries will look risible. And provisions for the minority of researchers who are retired, institutionally affiliated or otherwise unable to pay the low costs of peer review will be made. We don't need to retain the present access-denial juggernaut in order to take care of that small minority of special cases.)

TC: "[T]here was no "plausible path" for print to electronic publishing, yet it happened. If people as well placed as yourself were advocating... [university peer-review consortia] I am sure it might have a strong chance of catching on."

(1) If I were anywhere near as "well placed" as you imagine I am, dear Talat, we would have had 100% Green OA a decade and a half ago.

(2) Electronic publishing did not face the regenerating heads of the 34-headed monster responsible for the "Zeno's Paralysis" that besets Green OA -- a syndrome to which you, Talat, are alas not immune either:

#1. Preservation
#7. Peer review
#9. Downsizing
#10. Copyright
#17. Publishers
#18. Libraries
#30. Redirecting Cancellation Savings
#32. Poisoned Apple

The only effective medication, apparently, is Green OA mandates, and, luckily, relief is on the way:

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

TC: "...'relieving' journals of costs also "relieves" them of profits, which they won't want. It's myopic, to use your word, to suggest that this won't cause problems fairly soon."

Fairly soon? Self-archiving at 100% levels in high energy physics has not yet begun to be felt in cancellations in 17 years (both APS and IOP have confirmed this publicly: see the publications of Alma Swan). I am optimistic about mandates, but not so optimistic that I think that 100% Green OA will be with us "fairly soon." So how can a library cancel a journal while only an unknown percentage of articles from an unknown number of mandating universities are being self-archived?

I can only repeat: It would do a lot more good if we self-archived (and supported self-archiving mandates) more and speculated about the future of publishing (or libraries) less...

TC: "[Publishers currently endorse OA self-archiving] under licence which they remain free to withdraw, if that should be in their interests. Don't fool yourself that they couldn't if need be. At present it doesn't serve publishers to do so, so they don't. This is no basis on which to plan."

I cannot fathom, Talat, why you would prefer to keep speculating about whether and when publishers might withdraw their Green light to self-archive instead of pressing on with self-archiving and self-archiving mandates while the going is Green. This is one of the 34 familiar symptoms of Zeno's Paralysis, and it's been with us for years now:

#32. Poisoned Apple
I worry about self-archiving even if the journal gives me the green light to do so, because if I do, the light may change to red."

The answer to your question is that as Green OA grows, the risk to publishers is less that of losing subscribers, but that of losing authors. And losing authors would certainly accelerate cancellations a lot faster than the anarchic growth of Green OA self-archiving will. (Losing Harvard authors today would be bad enough, but it would only get worse, if the publishers' response to OA mandates were to try to revert to Gray instead of Green.)

The only thing you need to "plan" today is how to facilitate the provision of Green OA.

TC: "I happen to believe that nobody wants Gold OA in the future, as they don't appear to want it now."

Most researchers don't want Gold OA now because the money to pay for it is tied up in subscriptions and the asking price is way too high. What they want now is OA, and Green OA mandates will see to it that they get (and give) it.

If and when the subscription funds are released, the price drops, and there is no other way to publish, researchers will want Gold OA.

But why keep speculating about if and when? Green OA is within reach, and all it needs is more and more Green OA mandates.

TC: "Arts departments have not co-operated with the Green OA revolution, as has recently been brought home to me here by our English Department."

No? It seems to me that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Science voted unanimously for Harvard's Green OA mandate. All the other universities that have mandates have English Departments too.

TC: "This is because we haven't understood their needs and continue to talk only about the most recent cutting edge science departments. Arts subjects are much more concerned with what you dismiss as "legacy" literature, preservation, book publishing, without which OA means little to them. We have sought no answers for any of these areas and so have no solutions for these academics."

OA's primary targets are journal articles; Green OA mandates only mandate the self-archiving of journal articles. The Arts and Humanities disciplines are more book-intensive than journal-intensive compared to the Physical, Biological and Social Sciences. But inasmuch as they publish in journals at all, no discipline is indifferent to the usage and impact of its journal articles. So:

(1) Preservation is important (but no more relevant to OA than non-OA).

(2) Book-publishing, inasmuch as it is not an author give-away literature, the way refereed journal articles are, is (so far) irrelevant.

(3) The legacy literature will have its turn once the current and forward-going literature is OA. (World hunger, the cure of all diseases and the righting of all wrongs and injustice will have to wait too, I am afraid: We're just talking about righting one wrong here: needless and obsolete access-denial for refereed research journal articles in the online age.)

TC: "...repository managers, their libraries and therefore their institutions... may not be so eager to follow your predictions as you hope, given that you have such a poor view of their "legacy" holdings and given the comments I have made on the failure to address the needs of all disciplines. I'm not sure we even have a solution for sciences and social sciences."

OA IRs are not preservation archives, they are access-provision archives. And the access is to their own institutional research output, not to the licensed subscription content their libraries have bought in from other institutions. (There is some fundamental underlying confusion here, or a conflation of two agendas, only one of which is OA. And none of this has anything to do with discipline differences.To my knowledge, no significant discipline differences have been reported across all the disciplines tested, either for the size of the OA impact advantage, or for the willingness to comply with OA mandates.)

TC: "as I have agreed, we are stuck with the necessity for mandates asap. [But] publishers and universities alike need to find different funding models now, ahead of time, before conflict arises with the publishers, as it must inevitably do if we simply eyeball them from the trenches waving our mandates."

I'm glad we agree on the necessity of mandates, Talat (although only one of us regrets that we are "stuck" with them).

But we will have to agree to disagree on the advance need to find different funding models. Or rather, I would say we have found already a different funding model (Gold: author-institutions pays for publication output instead of user-institution paying for publication input), but its time has not yet come: Universally mandated OA is needed first, to pave the way.

TC: "The relationship between library (i.e. those who acquire both resource and locus of deposit) and researcher is key to the solution, as any good subject librarian will tell you. I fear that you don't understand how libraries form a key part of the way in which the institutions who they serve, and who you mention as players in this, actually change policy in the interests of the researchers. This is the main point of contact in the institution."

Talat, is the role of libraries and librarians in the transition to free online access to research journal articles really that apparent? Did good subject librarians know where we're all heading a-priori, even before the online era?

OA is largely a matter for the research community: They are the providers as well as the users. But unlike with books, which need to be bought in and collected by their libraries, it is not at all obvious that OA requires library mediation.

It is fine if the library is made the manager of the IR, but then let the task be taken on as the radically new task it really is, rather than forced into the Procrustean Bed of what the library's traditional expertise and functions have been. OA is new territory, requiring new, Open mind-sets, not "what any good subject librarian already knows"...

TC: "I would instead hope to hear direct answers to the points raised, as well as a reasoned argument against "consortia" journals rather than merely waving them aside as a foolish repository manager's fancy."

You've had direct answers, Talat: Self-archiving mandates have already been tested and demonstrated to generate Green OA, they are feasible, they are growing, and they scale (to all universities and all funders).

What has been tested and demonstrated with (1) generating peer-review consortia and (2) getting journal titles and authors to migrate to them?

It does not help to repeat an N of 1 (the Board of Celtic Studies). There are over 3000 Gold OA journals, and you yourself doubt they will scale...

TC: "Sadly it appears this point has been side-stepped deliberately, as I confess that I anticipated. Core Green OA forecasts, however speculative, are to be supported. Others are to be rejected as mere speculations, a double standard."

No double standard. I have left no substantive point unanswered.

TC: "from the academics' expressed point of view... [self-archiving] is a new obligation that impinges on, as they see it, what they do with their copyright. Hence it looks like coercion. Taking heed of this reaction is the only way to get true co-operation."

Arthur's Sale's studies (and the continuing evidence since) keep confirming that authors willingly comply with self-archiving mandates. The latest two mandates (from Harvard) have been unanimously voted in by the academics themselves.

TC: "I'm not in a position to [university peer-review consortia]. But I suggest that someone whose advocacy on the subject will be heard, such as yourself, might be in a position to popularise the idea speedily, if you wished to put your efforts into it."

I did put my efforts behind alternative publishing models, a decade and a half ago, when I thought the problem was in the publishing model. Crashing failure made me realize that the problem was not in the publishing model but in academics' heads (Zeno's Paralysis). And the tried and tested cure is Green OA mandates, and they are happening. So why should we go back to old, far-fetched, and discarded hypotheses?

TC: "Simply, what we don't have is an answer to how peer review, copy editing and so forth will actually be provided after the Green OA revolution."

What we need now is not an answer to that question! What we need now is universal Green OA!

TC: "If there is no way forward, the revolution cannot happen."

There is a way forward: Green OA self-archiving mandates, by universities and funders, and they are happening.

TC: "I support Green OA but I do not believe at all that it will, or should, lead to Gold OA."

Fine. Let it just lead to Green OA!

TC: "There is no natural progression in this whatsoever, as nobody wants Gold OA anyway."

Fine. It is OA that research needs, not necessarily Gold OA.

TC: "If you destroy the publishers, as you suggest, who will then do the peer review?"

Where did I ever suggest "destroying the publishers"? (The talk of impending destruction, catastrophe and doom has come from speculators (and mostly by those with vested interests in the status quo, such as publishers, but sometimes also, for different reasons, librarians).

And peer review will continue to be done (for free) by the peers who review, regardless of who is paying to implement the process, or how.

TC: "All this talk about costs is a whitewash: they are relatively insignificant anyway compared to the research process. Universities could easily shoulder them, especially given savings from subscriptions, which are exorbitant."

You sound like you are saying the same thing I am now. So why are we talking about costs, and who will pay them, and when, when the urgent issue is Green OA, and getting it mandated so that we have it, at long last, now?

TC: "Find a solution to the future source of peer review (that isn't merely Gold OA) and you solve the whole thing. This peer review problem is all that is holding back Green OA. Forget Gold OA, it simply isn't part of the solution."

No, it is Zeno's Paralysis that is holding back Green OA, and one of the symptoms of Zeno's Paralysis is fretting needlessly about who is going to pay for peer review if and when it is no longer being paid by subscriptions.

But the OA problem is not "who is going to pay for peer review if and when it is no longer being paid by subscriptions." It is the research access and impact that continues to be lost daily, as we sit counterfactually speculating, day in and day out, about the future of publishing instead of the present of research.

And the solution is at researcher' fingertips: They just need to do the keystrokes that will get their articles into their Green OA IRs.

And the cure for what is holding back researchers' fingers is Green OA mandates.

You have created an IR, Talat, but we know that's not enough. You now have to help fill it, and your scepticism about university mandates and preference for conjectures about university peer-review consortia certainly is not helping to fill it.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Peter Murray-Rust: “Most chemistry publishing is closed access, not even allowing Green self-archiving (unless paid for). There is no sign that any of the major closed publishers (ACS, RSC, Wiley, Springer, Elsevier, Nature) are likely to change in the immediate future.”

Peter Murray-Rust is quite right that ACS is likely to be the very last of all publishers to go Green on OA self-archiving, but he is mistaken about most of the others on his list:

ACS: gray
RSC: GREEN
Wiley: GREEN
Springer: GREEN
Elsevier: GREEN
Nature: pale-green

PM-R: "Thanks Stevan. I am happy to be corrected on Wiley, Springer and Elsevier. I seem to remember that the RSC announced it was Green ca. 2 years ago. That got into Romeo but then they said they weren’t green after all and it was a mistake.

"I am also not really clear any more what pale-green is. I assume “gray” means neither gold nor green."

(1) Pale-green means the publisher endorses the self-archiving of the author’s draft but not the final refereed postprint (though often what the publisher really means by the postprint is the publisher’s PDF).

The difference between the author’s penultimate draft and the final, refereed draft is of course a purely notional one, and no faintly coherent case for the distinction could ever be made in a court of law. So although some superstitious authors make a distinction between pale-green publishers and green publishers, of course there is in reality no substantive difference: Both have given their blessing to the self-archiving of the author’s final draft.

(Gray does indeed mean neither Gold nor Green. But Gold OA publishers are of course, a fortiori, also Green. So the only relevant distinction at issue is Green vs. not-Green.)

(2) The RSC has some right royal double-talk in its contracts. They say they endorse self-archiving on the author’s “personal website”, but not the author’s “institutional repository”:

“When the author signs the exclusive Licence to Publish for a journal article, he/she retains certain rights that may be exercised without reference to the RSC. He/she may…

Photocopy the article and distribute such photocopies and distribute copies of the PDF… for personal or professional use only, provided that any such copies are not offered for sale…

Adapt the article and reproduce adaptations of the article for any purpose other than the commercial exploitation of a work similar to the original…

Make available the PDF of the article mentioned above via the personal website(s) of the author(s)…

This is of course arbitrary gibberish, and again only for the credulous and the superstitious. All RSC authors can self-archive their final drafts in their own IRs with perfect impunity. A “personal website” is merely a disk sector label. For the pedant, the university can (as Southampton ECS has done since 2002) formally declare an author’s IR disk sector to be the author’s “personal website”:

“3e. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the EPrint Archive is a part of the Department’s infrastructure for your personal homepage.”

In a few years we will be giggling shame-facedly at the stuff and nonsense that kept (most of) us from going ahead and doing the optimal, inevitable and obvious for so long.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum