Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: Sandy Thatcher (President, AAUP) thinks universities prefer building football fields to paying for publishing. I reply that universities are already paying for publishing today, via their journal subscriptions, and that if that cash is ever saved (because subscriptions are cancelled, mandated Green OA having made all journal articles accessible online for free) and journals convert to Gold OA publishing, universities will still need to "publish or perish," which still trumps building football fields. So universities will redirect a portion of their windfall cancellation savings to cover that basic necessity. Only a portion of those savings will be needed, though, because journals will have downsized to just providing peer review, which costs much less than publishing does now. Universities' own institutional repositories will take over the burden of providing the documents, the archiving and the access.

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Sandy Thatcher [ST], President, American Association of University Publishers (AAUP) wrote in liblicense:

ST: "I wish I had as much faith as Stevan [Harnad] that the 'of course' follows from his preceding argument.

'And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.'

"The cynic in me says that it is just as likely that universities will use the "windfall savings" to expand their football stadiums!

"Maybe universities in Britain act "rationally" in this way to move available funds toward supporting research as a top priority. The history of higher education in the U.S. suggests that this is not always the top priority that probably everyone on this listserv would wish it to be."

Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The plain fact is that neither publishers nor universities are faced with this eventuality now. And there is certainly no need or justification for demanding that universities pre-empt it, by "committing" in advance to fund anything whatsoever, at this time.

The academic rule -- and for research universities, it definitely trumps football fields, otherwise we are talking about the forces that trump research itself, and that goes far beyond the scope of this discussion -- is Publish or Perish. Today, in our still non-OA world, publishing is being paid for by the subscriber-university, not by the author-university (though they are largely the same university).

Hence, the only thing missing today is OA itself (and perhaps some more football fields) -- not some sort of advance commitment by each university that mandates OA to pay (journal) publishers for anything else at all. Journal publishers are already being paid in full for what they are selling today, and the universities are the buyers. Paying or pledging anything more would simply amount to double-dipping at this time.

Self-archiving mandates are providing universities, their researchers and research with exactly what they are missing today: OA. OA (in case it is not already evident by now) is simply the natural online-age extension of Publish or Perish itself: The reason universities already mandate that their researchers must have their research peer-reviewed and published is that unpublished, unvalidated research is no research at all: it leads to no benefits to anyone, neither knowledge fans nor football fans. Unvalidated, unpublished research, sitting in a desk drawer, may as well not have been done at all. No one can access it, use it, apply it, build upon it.

And research that may as well not have been done at all may as well not have been funded at all, by either the university or the tax-payer.

So we already have Publish or Perish, and in the online age, we have, in addition, "Self-Archive to Flourish," because unnecessary access-barriers are also unnecessary barriers to using, applying and building upon research. Toll-access today is just a bigger desk-drawer.

Toll-booths were necessary in the paper era, to pay the essential costs of generating and disseminating hard copies. (That -- plus peer review -- was what "publishing" meant, way back then.) But today, in the online era, the essential costs of making research accessible to any would-be user webwide reduce to just the costs of implementing peer review -- and those costs (and then some) are currently being paid in full by university journal subscriptions, thank you very much!

So Ian Russell (Chief Executive, ALPSP) is quite mistaken to call his old alma mater, the University of Southampton, a "parasite" for having been the first university in the world to adopt an "unfunded" Green OA self-archiving mandate (beginning with the mandate of Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science in 2001, now university-wide).

What Southampton (and, since then, over twenty other universities and departments, including, Harvard, twice) as well as over twenty research funding agencies (starting with the UK parliamentary Science and Technology Committee's mandate recommendation in 2003, and lately including RCUK's, ERC's and NIH's implemented mandates) have done in mandating Green OA for their own research output is not parasitic by any stretch -- while universities continue to pay the costs of publication through subscriptions. Indeed, such mandates could only be "funded" if universities were foolish enough to fund double-dipping by publishers (which Ian rightly disavows), or agreed to lock themselves into paying the current asking price for whatever goods and services publishers bundle into their current product, come what may.

So, as I said, things would only begin to be parasitic if universities elected not to pay for the costs of publishing their own research once those publishing costs were no longer being covered by subscriptions (from other universities).

For if (research) universities elected to build football fields out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings even after the (hypothetical OA-induced) collapse of subscriptions as the means of covering the (sole remaining essential) cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing (i.e., peer review), then research, researchers, and research universities would simply perish: Publish or Perish.

If this extinction is indeed fated to happen, please blame football -- force majeure -- not OA, or university parasitism! But until and unless football really does prevail in the Academy [I'm not claiming it couldn't!], trust that if push ever comes to shove, the Publish or Perish Mandate itself will see to it that the pennies from the universities' windfall subscription cancellation savings that need to be redirected to pay for the true remaining costs -- of getting their own research output refereed and published -- can and will indeed be so redirected. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

But the point is that there is no Necessity -- hence no Parasitism -- now.

Just a pressing need for universities to put a long-overdue end to their needless daily, weekly, monthly, yearly research impact loss, which has been accumulating, foolishly, gratuitously, and irretrievably, since at least the 1990's.

This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but blindingly -- to historians in hindsight. To quote the wag (in a 1999 "Opinion piece... [that did] not necessarily reflect the views of D-Lib Magazine, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, or DARPA" [at the time!]):

"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us..."

So the big lesson that still remains to be learned is a lesson for the universities: it is they (not publishers) who needlessly delayed (by well over a decade) adopting the natural PostGutenberg upgrade of their paper-era Publish or Perish Mandates to extend them to the self-archiving of their own peer-reviewed research output, so as to maximize its usage and impact.

The only lesson journal publishers need to learn from this is that they are -- and always were -- merely service-providers for the universities, who in turn are the research-providers, and paying (through the teeth) for the publishers' service, until further notice.

OA is obviously optimal for research, researchers and their institutions. The publishing tail needs to learn to stop trying to wag the research dog. Adapt to whatever is best for the research-providers and the symbiosis (not parasitism) will continue, felicitously, as it was always destined to do.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Ian Russell (CEO of ALPSP) is an alumnus of U. Southampton, the institution that designed and adopted the world's first Green OA self-archiving mandate (first as a departmental mandate, then university-wide).
    Ian suggests that his alma mater's mandate is "parasitic" because it is "unfunded." By unfunded, Ian does not mean that Southampton isn't funding its own Institutional Repositories (IRs) (it is); he means that Southampton does not provide funds to pay the costs of publication.
    But of course Southampton (like all other research universities) is already funding the costs of publication: through its journal subscriptions. Subscriptions buy in the research output of other universities; this has nothing to do with mandating the self-archiving of Southampton's own research output.
    If and when all universities mandate self-archiving, and if and when the resultant universal Green OA causes subscriptions to become unsustainable as the means of covering publishing costs, then journals will convert to Gold OA publishing and universities will pay the publication costs for their own research output out of a portion of their windfall subscription cancellation savings. This is already guaranteed by universities' longstanding mandate to "Publish or Perish." (No risk of "parasitism," because otherwise the "parasite" would perish.)
    But for publishers to ask universities to pay publication costs now -- at current asking prices, and while the potential funds are still tied up paying for it via subscriptions -- is either to seek double-dipping or to seek an indefensible hedge against any downsizing and cost-cutting that might be induced by mandated OA.
    OA is optimal and inevitable for research, and feasible right now, through Green OA self-archiving mandates. Both universities and publishers will adapt quite naturally to its sequelae.

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The view of Ian Russell (who is Chief Executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers [ALPSP] and also an alumnus of the University of Southampton) on the subject of the University of Southampton's Green Open Access (OA) Self-Archiving Mandate is presented in a series of exchanges on liblicense.

Ian criticizes the University of Southampton's mandate as "parasitic" because it is "unfunded." By "unfunded," he does not mean that the University of Southampton does not fund its own Institutional Repository (which it of course does -- although it does not cost much); he means that the University of Southampton does not fund the cost of publishing its own research output.

But universities do not fund the cost of publishing their own research output: What universities fund is the cost of publishing other universities' research output. And they fund that through subscriptions, which buy in access to the peer-reviewed research output of other universities. That is called the subscription model for publication cost-recovery, and until recently, it was the universal model.

Recently, a small but growing minority (c. 10%) of journals have made their contents freely accessible online to all users. These are called Open Access (OA) journals, and publishing in them is called the "golden road" to OA -- the self-archiving of non-OA journal articles being the "green road" to OA (and that, not Gold OA, is what Southampton, Harvard and the other universities are mandating).

Moreover, as Peter Suber frequently points out, the majority of this minority of Gold OA journals still recovers costs on the subscription (or subsidy) model too. Fewer than half of them levy publication fees, which are then paid for either by the author's research funder or the author -- or, in the case of special "membership" agreements with BioMed Central journals or consortial agreements with SCOAP3 journals, the author's university.

Ian Russell is looking for an advance guarantee from universities that mandate Green OA self-archiving that they will pay Gold OA publishing costs. It is not clear whether he means that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs right now, or that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs if and when subscriptions were ever to collapse. By way of support, Ian cites the Wellcome Trust, which makes such a guarantee to pay, right now.

Either way, such a guarantee certainly is not forthcoming from universities now, nor should it be.

Wellcome, as a research funder, has mandated self-archiving of the research that it funds and has also offered to pay Gold OA publishing costs out of some of those research funds, under current conditions, at current asking prices (when subscriptions certainly have not collapsed).

Universities, however, are not, like Wellcome, research funders. Universities are research fundees and research providers. They also subscribe to journals. As such, they are currently paying for publication costs via journal subscriptions, which have not collapsed.

As noted, when universities mandate self-archiving, they are mandating the self-archiving of their own (refereed) research output. When they pay journal subscriptions, they are buying in the refereed research output of other universities.

If and when journal subscriptions ever do collapse, what that means is that universities will no longer be paying them, and hence that those annual windfall savings will become available to universities to pay the publication costs of their own refereed research output. And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.

(I say "only a portion of those windfall savings," because "publication" will then [i.e., "post-collapse"] mean only peer review implementation costs, not all of the other products and services that subscriptions are paying for today: producing and distributing the print edition, producing and licensing the online PDF edition, fulfillment, archiving, advertising. The post-collapse costs of publication -- peer review alone -- will be much lower.)

In other words, there is nothing for universities to guarantee to pay today, when subscriptions are still sustainable, and still covering all publishing costs, including peer review. And they certainly don't yet have any extra loose change from cancellations to pay the current asking price for Gold OA.

So let's wait for the hypothesized subscription collapse -- if and when it comes -- to free up the universities' funds to pay the cost of having their own research output peer-reviewed and certified as such by the journal's title and track record. Until then, those costs are being covered by existing subscriptions, and the only thing missing is not fee-guarantees but open access -- which is exactly what university self-archiving mandates (like that of Ian Russell's alma mater, Southampton) are intended to ensure (but Harvard's mandate is not one to sneeze at either!)

[To repeat: What it is that urgently needs to be ensured today is open access -- certainly not publishers' revenues, based on the current cost-recovery model and at current asking prices. Publishing is a service to research, not vice versa.]

I close with some quote/comments. (All quotes are from Ian Russell [IR]):

IR: "If we can agree that wide-spread archiving will mean that established subscription income will decline, then surely funds have to be unambiguously made available for the only other show in town: author-side payment."

Funds have to be made available now? while they are still tied up in paying subscriptions? If you are not talking about double-dipping, Ian, then you need to explain where this double-funding is meant to come from -- and why -- in advance of the decline. (For the decline itself will be what releases the requisite funds, if and when it happens.)

And is it "decline" we were talking about, or collapse? (I.e., the subscription model becoming no longer sustainable to cover the true cost of publishing in the OA era.)

For if we are only talking about demand declining here, rather than (as I had thought) about its becoming unsustainable, then the natural response would seem to be publisher cost-cutting, by downsizing to the essentials that are still in demand, rather than guaranteed props for sustaining all the products and services that are currently co-bundled into the published journal subscription, at current prices. Demand-decline is a signal that some products and services are becoming superfluous in the OA era, rather than a signal that they must continue to be provided and paid for at all costs.

IR: "We can't have it both ways and say that subscriptions will still pay the bills AND that cancellations (and hence cost savings) are inevitable."

But we can say that if and when subscriptions are cancelled, universities will have the windfall savings out of which to pay the bills in the new way. (And the cost-cutting and downsizing are just as likely as the cancellations; indeed, they are the flip side of the very same coin.)

If you don't mind my saying so, Ian, you do seem to be more inclined to herald only the bleak side of this prophecy (subscription collapse) rather than its bright side (windfall savings out of which to pay for peer review). And you seem all too ready to see daily research usage and impact continue to be lost as a consequence, unless universities somehow ante up extra funds today to cover everything being supplied at today's asking prices, regardless of demand (while you continue to disavow advocating double-dipping)...

That sounds like a hedge against whatever might turn out to be the real needs of research and researchers in the OA era.

IR: "As regards "double-dipping", it is important not to conflate the issues for an individual journal or research institution with those of the system as a whole."

Agreed. But am I doing the conflating, Ian, or are you? An individual university's Green OA self-archiving mandate (like Southampton's, or Harvard's) has nothing to do with either any individual journal (whether subscription or Gold OA) or the system as a whole.

If and when all universities mandate self-archiving (as I hope they all soon will), that in turn may or may not eventually make subscriptions unsustainable. If it does, then it will also (eo ipso and pari passu) have released the funds to pay for publication on the Gold OA model, subscriptions having become unsustainable -- but not before. There is still plenty of room for some PostGutenberg downsizing, cost-cutting and adaptation before that.

What we will have before any of that hypothetical adaptation, however, is OA itself (which is already long, long overdue), in the form of universal (because mandated) Green OA.

IR: "I don't believe that the PLoS journals could be accused of double-dipping..."

Certainly not. But what do Gold OA journals have to do with university Green OA self-archiving mandates?

IR: "...nor journals that reduce their subscription prices in line with the number of articles published under an author-side payment system."

Ian, I regret that not only would I never recommend buying-in to such a hedged price lock-in system, but I do not for a moment believe that any journal is sincerely putting it into practice. It is just a notion. McDonald's could make the same offer, that if their clients' employers agree to buy into Gold Open Access burgers, free for all, they'll reduce the burger selling price for their remaining direct clients proportionately.

No, if there's going to be a conversion from institutional subscriptions to institutional publication fees, let those fees be shaped by cost-cutting pressure from the PostGutenberg Green OA economies: That pressure will arise from the university mandates to self-archive their own published research, and to provide their own institutional repositories to take over the load and cost of distribution, access-provision and archiving in the OA era -- rather than publishers continuing to co-bundle those goods and services into their current product at their current asking price.

IR: "Why should PLoS lose out because Southampton University (for example) refuses to cover author-side payment fees?"

With respect, I cannot see at all how a Gold OA journal like PLoS is losing out because Southampton is mandating Green OA self-archiving for its own research output! Those researchers who can afford to publish in PLoS journals today, and wish to, can and will.

(Moreover, as far as I know, PLoS is a supporter of self-archiving mandates -- and not just those by funders who offer to pay for today's Gold OA publication fees. And after the "Fall," PLoS too will be able to downsize to the reduced cost of just providing the service of peer review and no more.)

IR: "I am asking institutions not to mandate deposit of research that has been peer-reviewed by a journal, yes, because it is parasitic on the journals system (irrespective of business model) and I do not see how they can claim the right to do so."

And the obvious reply is that it will only be parasitic if and when subscriptions collapse, should institutions then still refuse to pay for publication. (But then of course the parasite will perish, because it will not be able to publish, unless it is ready to use some of its windfall subscription savings to pay for it.)

Until then, institutions have every right to mandate providing open access to their own peer-reviewed research output, whose peer-review costs are all being fully covered by subscriptions today. Nothing in the least bit parasitic about that.

IR: "As I have said repeatedly in this exchange so long as the system is paying for the certification elements of scholarly exchange I have no problem."

Well, the system is indeed still paying for it, Ian, so I have no choice but to conclude that you have no problem!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Joseph Esposito wrote:

"Hey, Stevan, come off it. Read the article. Once again you pick a fight when I mostly agree with you."

I was commenting on your interview rather than your article, but if you insist, here goes. The comments are much the same. I think we are galaxies apart, Joe, because you keep on imagining that OA is about unrefereed peer-to-peer content, whereas it is about making all peer-reviewed journal articles freely accessible online:

Comments on: Esposito, J. (2007) Open Access 2.0: The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work. The Scientist 21(11) 52.

open access does not appear to increase dissemination significantly... [because] Most researchers are affiliated with institutions, whether academic, governmental, or corporate, that have access to most of the distinguished literature in the field.

Strongly disagree. You think there is little or no access problem; user surveys and library budget statistics suggest otherwise.

Thus, though there may be some exceptional situations, especially in the short term, the increased dissemination brought about by open access takes place largely at the margins of the research community.

Strongly disagree. On the contrary, it is the top 10-20% of articles -- the ones most users use and cite -- that benefit most from being made OA. (They receive 80-90% of the citations.)

Another important reason open access does not significantly increase dissemination is that attention, not scholarly content, is the scarce commodity. You can build it, but they may not come.

Strongly disagree. To repeat, OA is about published journal articles; so making them free online merely adds to whatever access they enjoy already.

It is one thing to write an article and upload it to a Web server somewhere, where it will be indexed by Google and its ilk. It is fully another thing for someone to find that article out of the growing millions on the Internet by happening upon just the right combination of keywords to type into a search bar.

Strongly disagree, and this is the heart of the equivocation. You are speaking here about self-publishing of unrefereed, unpublished papers, whereas OA is about making published, peer-reviewed articles OA -- whether by publishing them in an OA journal or by self-archiving them in an OA Institutional Repository (IR).

The very same indices and search engines that find the published articles will find the OA ones too, because making them OA is just an add-on to publishing them in the first place. It is only because you keep seeing the OA papers as not being peer-reviewed and published, Joe, that you give yourself and others the impression that there is an either/or here -- when in reality OA is about both/and.

Would you rather double the amount of published information available to you, or increase the amount of time you have to review information you can already access by one hour a day? We are awash in information, but short on time to evaluate it. Open access only worsens this by opening the floodgates to more and more unfiltered information.

This is a false opposition: OA is about accessing all journal articles, not just the minority that your institution can afford. If there are too many articles and too little time, affordability is surely not the way to cope with it! Let it all be OA and then decide how much of it you can afford the time to read. The candidates are all available via exactly the same indexes and search engines. The only difference is that without OA, many are inaccessible, whereas with OA they all are.

open access is most meaningful within a small community whose members know each other and formally and informally exchange the terms of discourse.

You are again thinking of direct, peer-to-peer exchange of unrefereed content, whereas OA is about peer-reviewed, published journal articles, irrespective of community size. (The usership of most published research journal articles is very small.)

Many of the trappings of formal publishing are of little interest to many tight-knit communities of researchers. Who needs peer review, copy editing, or sales and marketing?

I agree about not needing the sales and marketing, and perhaps the copy editing too; but since OA is about peer-reviewed journal articles, the answer to that is: all users need it.

what of the work for which there is little or no audience? What if there is simply no market? This is the ideal province of open access publishing: providing services to authors whose work is so highly specialized as to make it impossible to command the attention of a wide readership.

Most journal articles have little or no audience. This is a spurious opposition. And we are talking about OA, not necessarily OA publishing.

the innermost spiral of the shell of a nautilus, where a particular researcher wishes to communicate with a handful of intimates and researchers working in precisely the same area. Many of the trappings of formal publishing are of little interest to this group. Peer review? But these are the peers; they can make their own judgments.

The peers are quite capable of making the distinction between one another's unrefereed preprints and their peer-reviewed journal articles; and the difference is essential, regardless of the size of the field. OA is not about dispensing with peer review. It is about maximizing access to its outcome.

the next spiral is for people in the field but not working exactly on the topic of interest to the author; one more spiral and we have the broader discipline (e.g., biochemistry); beyond that are adjacent disciplines (e.g., organic chemistry); until we move to scientists in general, other highly educated individuals, university administrators, government policy-makers, investors, and ultimately to the outer spirals, where we have consumer media, whose task is to inform the general public.

I can't follow all of this: It seems to me all these "spirals" need peer-reviewed content. There is definitely a continuum from unrefereed preprints to peer-reviewed postprints -- I've called that the "Scholarly Skywriting" continuum -- but peer-review continues to be an essential function in ensuring the quality of the outcome, and certifying it as worth the time to read and the effort of trying to build upon or apply.

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).

not all brands are created equal.

That's what journal names, peer-review standards and track records are for

Whatever the virtues of traditional publishing, authors may choose to work in an open-access environment for any number of reasons. For one, they simply may want to share information with fellow researchers, and posting an article on the Internet is a relatively easy way to do that

Again the false opposition: It is not "traditional publishing" vs. an unrefereed free-for-all. OA is about making traditionally peer-reviewed and published articles free for all online.

(I think some of the funding agencies have been misinformed about the benefits of open access, and they certainly have been misinformed about the costs, especially over the long term, but it certainly is within the prerogatives of a funding agency to stipulate open-access publishing.)

The funding agencies are mandating OA, not OA publishing. They have been correctly informed about the benefits of OA (it maximizes research access, usage and impact); the costs of IRs and Green OA self-archiving are negligible and the costs of Gold OA publishing are irrelevant (since OA publishing is not what is being mandated).

Whether in the long term mandated Green OA will lead to a transition to Gold OA is a matter of speculation: No one knows whether or when. But if and when it does, the institutional money currently paying for non-OA subscriptions will be more than enough to pay for Gold OA publishing (which will amount to peer review alone) several times over.

open access would be useful for: an article that may have been rejected by one or more publishers, but the author still wants to get the material "out there";

No, OA is not for "research spam" (as you called it, more candidly, in your Interview): OA is for all peer-reviewed research; all 2.5 million articles published in all 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals, in all disciplines, countries and languages, at all levels of the journal quality hierarchy.

an author who may be frustrated by the process and scheduling of traditional publishers;

Authors can certainly self-archive their preprints early if they wish,
but OA begins with the refereed postprint (and that can be self-archived on the day the final draft is accepted).

an author who may have philosophical reservations about working with large organizations, especially those in the for-profit sector, not to mention deep and growing suspicions about the whole concept of intellectual property.

I am not sure what all that means, but it's certainly not researchers' primary motivation for providing OA, nor its primary benefit.

A reason to publish in an open-access format need not be very strong, as the barriers to such publication are indeed low. It takes little: an Internet connection, a Web server somewhere, and an address for others to find the material.

Again, the equivocation: There is no "OA format." The target content is published, peer-reviewed journal articles, and OA means making them accessible free for all online. Peer-to-peer exchange of unrefereed papers is useful, but that is not what OA is about, or for.

Over time the list of invited readers may grow, and some names may be dropped from the list. The author, in other words, controls access to the document. This access can be extended to an academic department or to the members of a professional society; access can be granted to any authenticated directory of users.

This is all just about the exchange of unrefereed content. It is not about OA.

At some point the author may remove all access restrictions, making the document fully open access.

Making unrefereed content freely accessible online is useful, but it is not what OA is about.

It is a matter of debate as to whether any of these steps, including the final one, constitutes "publication," but it is indisputable that access can be augmented and that the marginal cost of doing so approaches zero

. Providing free online access to unrefereed, unpublished content is not what OA is about, or for.

The fundamental tension in scholarly communications today is between the innermost spiral of the nautilus, where peers, narrowly defined, communicate directly with peers, and the outer spirals, which have been historically well-served by traditional means. Open-access advocates sit at the center and attempt to take their model beyond the peers.

There is no tension at all. Unrefereed preprints, circulated for peer feedback, are and have always been an earlier embryological stage of the publication continuum, with peer-review and publication the later stage. OA does not sit at the center. It is very explicitly focused on the published postprint, though self-archiving the preprint is always welcome too.

Now, Joe, can we agree that we do indeed disagree?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Joseph Esposito, a management consultant, says Open Access (OA) is "research spam." But OA's explicit target content is all 2.5 million peer-reviewed articles published annually in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals. (So either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!).
   Esposito says researchers' problem isn't access to journal articles (they already have that): rather, it's not having the time to read them. This will come as news to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to the articles in the journals their institution cannot afford, and to the authors of those articles, who are losing all that potential research impact.
   Search engines find it all, tantalizingly, but access depends on being able to afford the subscription tolls. Esposito also says OA is just for a small circle of peers: How big does he imagine the actual usership of most journal articles is?
   Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' bonuses for publishing profit, even though ACS is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access only to those who can afford to pay them for it (and for their bonuses).
   Esposito describes the efforts of researchers to inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying, but he does not attach a name to what anti-OA publishers are doing when they hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent OA self-archiving from being mandated. (Another surcharge for researchers, in addition to paying for their bonuses?)
   Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would comply with OA mandates, but he omits to mention that over 80% of those researchers report that they would self-archive willingly if mandated. (And where does Esposito think publishers would be without existing publish-or-perish mandates?)
   Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research article output is the time it takes to do the few keystrokes per article it takes to provide OA. That is what the mandates (and the metrics that reward them) are meant to accomplish at long last.

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Joseph Esposito is an independent management consultant (the "portable CEO") with a long history in publishing, specializing in "interim management and strategy work at the intersection of content and digital technology."

In an interview by The Scientist (a follow-up to his article, "The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work"), Esposito says Open Access (OA) is "research spam" -- making unrefereed or low quality research available to researchers whose real problem is not insufficient access but insufficient time.

In arguing for his "model," which he calls the "nautilus model," Esposito manages to fall (not for the first time) into many of the longstanding fallacies that have been painstakingly exposed and corrected for years in the self-archiving FAQ. (See especially Peer Review, Sitting Pretty, and Info-Glut.)

Like so many others, with and without conflicting interests, Esposito does the double conflation (1) of OA publishing (Gold OA) with OA self-archiving (of non-OA journal articles) (Green OA), and (2) of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles with unpublished preprints. It would be very difficult to call OA research "spam" if Esposito were to state, veridically, that Green OA self-archiving means making all articles published in all peer-reviewed journals (whether Gold or not) OA. (Hence either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!).

Instead, Esposito implies that OA is only or mainly for unrefereed or low quality research, which is simply false: OA's explicit target is the peer-reviewed, published postprints of all the 2.5 million articles published annually in all the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, from the very best to the very worst, without exception. (The self-archiving of pre-refereeing preprints is merely an optional supplement, a bonus; it is not what OA is about, or for.)

Esposito says researchers' problem is not access to journal articles: They already have that via their institution's journal subscriptions; their real problem is not having the time to read those articles, and not having the search engines that pick out the best ones.

Tell that to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to the specific articles they need in the journals to which their institution cannot afford to subscribe. (No institution comes anywhere near being able to subscribe to all 25,000, and many are closer to 250.)

And tell it also to the authors of all those articles to which all those would-be users are being denied access; their articles are being denied all that research impact. Ask users and authors alike whether they are happy with affordability being the "filter" determining what can and cannot be accessed. Search engines find it all for them, tantalizingly, but whether they can access it depends on whether their institutions can afford a subscription.

Esposito says OA is just for a small circle of peers ("6? 60? 600? but not 6000"): How big does he imagine the actual usership of most of the individual 2.5 million annual journal articles to be? Peer-reviewed research is an esoteric, peer-to-peer process, for the contents of all 25,000 journals: research is conducted and published, not for royalty income, but so that it can be used, applied and built upon by all interested peer specialists and practitioners, to the benefit of the tax-payers who fund their research; the size of the specialties varies, but none are big, because research itself is not big (compared to trade, and trade publication).

Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' bonuses for publishing profit, oblivious to the fact that the ACS is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access only to those who can afford to pay them for it.

Esposito also refers (perhaps correctly) to researchers' amateurish efforts to inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying -- passing in silence over the fact that the real lobbying pro's are the wealthy anti-OA publishers who hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent Green OA from being mandated.

Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would comply with OA mandates ("it's not news that people would comply with a requirement"), but he omits to mention that most researchers surveyed recognised the benefits of OA, and over 80% reported they would self-archive willingly if it was mandated, only 15% stating they would do so unwillingly. (One wonders whether Esposito also finds the existing and virtually universal publish-or-perish mandates of research institutions and funders tautological -- and where he thinks the publishers for whom he consults would be without those mandates.)



Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research output is the time it takes to do a few keystrokes per article. That, and only that, is what the mandates are all about, for busy, overloaded researchers: Giving those few keystrokes the priority they deserve, so they can at last start reaping the benefits -- in terms of research access and impact -- that they desire. The outcome is optimal and inevitable for the research community; it is only because this was not immediately obvious that the outcome has been so long overdue.

But the delay has been in no small part also because of the conflicting interests of the journal publishing industry for which Esposito consults. So it is perhaps not surprising that he should perceive it otherwise, unperturbed if things continue at a (nautilus) snail's pace for as long as possible...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: There are many valid arguments for Open Access (OA), but the claim that researchers or their universities are currently "double-paying" to "buy back" access to their own research output -- by (1) paying for the conduct of the research, giving it to journals, and then (2) paying for subscriptions to access it -- is invalid. Researchers already have their own results, and so does their own university. What their university library subscriptions are paying for is to buy-in (not buy-back) the research output of other universities, exactly as with books written by authors from other universities. (Some research, universities and university libraries are funded by public funds, some not. Unless OA is to be limited to only that subset, that is not a sufficient rationale for OA either.)
   There is a valid "double-payment" argument, though, when it is not the payer (the researcher, funder, or university) paying twice, but the payee -- the publisher -- getting paid twice (not necessarily by the same payer): This is the "Trojan Horse" of paying a "hybrid Gold OA" publisher (i.e., not a pure Gold OA publisher but a subscription-based publisher who offers the option of making individual articles OA in exchange for a fee) at a time when the potential funds for doing so are still tied up in the university subscriptions that are already paying that publisher's costs in full.
   Publishers need only be paid once. If mandated Green OA should ever make cost-recovery from subscription payments unsustainable (because it makes university subscription demand disappear), then the resultant university subscription windfall savings can be redirected to pay for the peer review on the Gold OA model, with all access-provision and archiving off-loaded onto the distributed network of university OA Repositories.

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There are many valid arguments for Open Access (OA): It maximizes research usage and impact, it enhances research and university visibility as well as researcher and university income, it accelerates national and international R&D productivity and progress, it helps developing countries, it helps inform the general public, it is useful for education and training, it might eventually reduce university library subscription costs.

But the widespread claim that researchers or their universities are currently "double-paying" to "buy back" access to their own research output -- by (1) paying for the conduct of the research, giving it to journals, and then (2) paying for subscriptions to access it -- is both invalid and unnecessary.

If you ask those who are making this argument exactly what they mean, you will get two different answers, neither of them coherent or defensible:

(1) "I am salaried, and government-funded, to do my research. I give the report of my research findings to my publisher for free. Then I or my university must buy a subscription to the journal in order to access my results."

This is incorrect. You already have your own research results, and so does your university. What your university library subscriptions are paying for is to buy in the research output of other universities. And the ones to whom your publisher is selling your research are other universities, not your own.

This is no more "buy-back" or "double-paying" than it is to pay for the books written by authors from other universities. Or any other output that the university both itself generates and also buys in from other universities.

Nor does the fact that books sometimes generate royalty revenue change this picture: Most books generate negligible royalty revenue or none at all.

(It is relevant however -- not as a buy-back/double-pay argument, but as a conflict of interest -- that researchers, unlike other authors, ask for no royalty income from their publisher, and publish their articles purely for the sake of their research impact, not their royalty income. Hence this royalty-free author give-away writing is not a "work for hire," and publishers are unjustified in trying to prevent or embargo its authors' attempts to maximize access to it by self-archiving it free for all online.)

(2) "My research is funded by public funds; so is my university, and so is my university's library. Hence it is somehow buy-back/double-pay for them to be paying for subscription access to it too."

This no longer sounds like buy-back/double-pay but something much more complicated, with some grains of truth. But those grains of truth are only being buried or distorted in calling this buy-back/double-pay. Not only is a lot of published research not publicly funded, not only are neither university researcher salaries nor institutional library budgets all or wholly derived from public funds, but again, much the same argument could be made for books and other university outputs (even commercial ones) if the underlying problem were indeed the buy-back/double-payment one.

So unless you think that OA should only be accorded to research if -- and in proportion to the degree to which -- public funders or universities are literally drawing twice from the same pot, you may be narrowing OA to a smaller and more difficult-to-determine subset of OA's real target, which is all of peer-reviewed research. (And you may also be making an argument against either the public funding of R&D or the selling of its output: That may be arguable, but it is a far, far bigger argument than OA!)

There is, however, one "double-payment" argument that is valid, but it is not the one the buy-back/double-payment complainants have in mind: rather the opposite. For in this valid double-payment argument it is not the payer (the researcher, his funder, or his university) who is paying twice, but the payee -- the publisher -- who is getting paid twice (but not necessarily by the same payer)

I am referring to the "Trojan Horse" of paying an extra fee to a "hybrid Gold OA" publisher (i.e., not a pure Gold OA publisher but a subscription-based publisher who offers the option of making individual articles OA in exchange for a fee) at a time when the potential funds for paying for that fee are still tied up in the university subscriptions that are already paying that publisher's costs. Hence universities or funders who opt for optional-Gold in a hybrid OA journal today must find extra funds to pay that optional-Gold OA fee (e.g., by redirecting money from research funds), even while all publishing costs are still being fully covered by subscriptions.

But this is not the kind of "double-payment" that the buy-back/double-pay complainants are agitating against: On the contrary, this is the kind that they are (prematurely, and unwittingly) agitating for.

The resolution of the "double-payment" puzzle is very simple: Publishers need only be paid once. Today they are mostly being paid (once, via subscriptions), for providing both (1) the peer-review service and (2) the paper and online editions. As long as the subscription market covers the costs, the only thing researchers need do for immediate OA is to self-archive the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their own published articles in their own university OA Repositories (Green OA); and the only thing their universities and funders need do is to mandate that they do so.

If and when Green OA should ever make cost-recovery from subscription payments unsustainable (because university subscription demand disappears), then the resultant university subscription windfall savings can be redirected to pay for the peer review (on the Gold OA cost-recovery model). And both the paper and online editions, for which there is (ex hypothesi) no longer any demand at that time, can be terminated (along with their expenses), off-loading all access-provision and archiving onto the distributed network of university OA Repositories that has already assumed the access-provision role de facto, in virtue of providing Green OA.

That's a tad more complicated than "buy-back/double-pay," but it is coherent, reflective of the facts and factors (actual and hypothetical) involved, and leads to the same outcome: 100% OA (first Green, and perhaps eventually Gold), but without any fuzziness, double-talk, or unsupportable arguments.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Universities are adopting Open Access Self-Archiving Policies (which is a very good thing) but the policies are often not the optimal ones, and are sometimes even inadvertently reducing instead of enhancing the access potential of university research output. In this exchange with Prof. Andrew Colman of the University Leicester, and Prof. Diane Kornbrot of University of the University of Hertfordshire, the simple parametric tweaks are pointed out that can change an ineffective OA Policy into an effective one. They are:
    (1) requiring rather than requesting deposit
    (2) requiring deposit in the university's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than in a central or discipline-based repository elsewhere
    (3) requiring deposit of the author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft, rather than the publisher's PDF (unless the publisher endorses PDF deposit)
    (4) requiring deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication rather than after a publisher-imposed delay or embargo period
    (5) during any embargo, deposits can instead simply be made Closed Access rather than Open Access (and the IR's "Fair Use" Button can send and receive eprint requests and eprints semi-automatically)

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Professor Andrew Colman, University of Leicester, wrote:

I am keen to have my publications archived where they are likely to be found by interested readers. After your encouraging reply [suggesting that I deposit, by default, peer-reviewed final manuscript drafts rather than the publisher's PDF], I spent a whole day retrieving 63 manuscript drafts of articles and tidying them up for deposit in the Leicester Research Archive. Because PDFs of the published versions are already in my own web space, I inserted a hyperlink on each manuscript version, directing readers to the PDF version.

I would advise you to to forward this exchange to the IP policy-makers at U Leicester, because the logic of the current UL policy has to be more carefully thought through. I am sure UL's motivation is to help, not hinder UL's research impact while ensuring everything is in conformity with the law. A few minor but critical changes in the current policy will accomplish both goals: maximal impact, and full legality:

A month later, less than half of my manuscripts are in the Leicester Research Archive. The archive has been seeking permission from the publishers [as a precondition] for archiving each manuscript draft, and, for those for which permission has been granted, have also carefully deleted the hyperlinks that I inserted at the top of each manuscript draft.

This is the policy that urgently needs to be carefully thought through again, as it has a few major, unnecessary flaws that are easily remediable, but do need to be remedied:

(1) All manuscripts should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. Deposit itself is entirely the prerogative of UL, an internal matter, not requiring permission from anyone. It is only access-setting to that deposited document -- i.e. Open Access vs. Closed Access -- that can depend in part on publisher policy.

(2) If the UL archivists wish to query the publishers about access-setting, that's fine: in the meanwhile, access to the full texts of the deposits can be set as Closed Access.

(3) If the response to the query is affirmative (or the policy indexed in Romeo endorses immediate OA self-archiving), set access as Open Access; otherwise, rely on the "Request Copy" "Fair Use" Button the Archive provides for those would-be users who need access to the Closed Access deposits during any embargo period:

See: "How the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate + the 'Fair Use' Button Work"

(Deleting hyperlinks to the PDFs on your website makes no sense at all!)

I am not convinced of the value of manuscript drafts on their own. Researchers cannot rely on them, even if they are in fact faithful versions of the published articles, which is seldom the case because of copy-editing alterations that are often not even discussed with authors.

You are judging this against the wrong baseline:

(a) If a potential user has access to either the publisher's paper version or PDF, they can and will use that. Those are not the users for whom the self-archived version is being provided.

(b) If a potential user does not have access to either the publisher's paper version or PDF, then their problem is not that they don't have access to a "faithful" copy-edited version, but that they have no access at all! Those are the target users for whom OA is needed, and being provided, and they are the ones who double research impact if they are at last given access.

Please do not think of OA self-archiving as a substitute subscription access (for now). The self-archived draft is a supplement to the subscription draft, provided for those who are denied subscription access. You can make your final draft as faithful as you judge necessary. But it would be a profound error in judgment and priorities to deprive would-be users of access altogether, when they can't afford subscription access at all, mistakenly thinking you are thereby protecting them from being deprived of the copy-editing!

Even if one had confidence in the accuracy of a manuscript version, it would be impossible to quote from it, because the pagination would be missing. I don't find other researchers' manuscript drafts nearly as useful as final PDFs.

Again, you are weighing this entirely from the wrong viewpoint: Those who can't access it, cannot read or use your research at all.

(And of course one can quote from a manuscript version. One quotes it, specifying the section and paragraph number instead of the page! That is in fact more accurate and scholarly than a page reference. And if the copy-editor (of the article one is writing, in which one is quoting from an article for which one only has access to the final draft, not the PDF) requests page-spans, that's the time to tell the copy-editor that one does not have subscription access, so let them look up the page numbers -- or use the even better scholarly indicator of section name and paragraph number.)

You said that "Leicester's only omission in all of this is not yet having mandated deposit; once it does that, all will go well". Worse than that, the person handling my submissions believes that publishers need to be contacted for each item, and that "unfortunately I do have to wait for permission to archive them, even if they are drafts. Generally publishers do not allow the 'as published versions' to be archived by anyone apart from themselves on their own sites and so for us to archive them, or provide links to sites, other than the publisher's official site, may breach copyright law... Unfortunately we are not allowed to even archive the drafts from the following publications which you have articles in [followed by a list]".

This UL provisional policy has not been thought through and needs only a few simple parametric changes to make it sensible and effective:

(i) The manuscript can and should be deposited immediately. No one's permission is needed for that, and the metadata are then immediately visible webwide, and the "Fair Use" Button can start doing its job.

(ii) The journal policy can already be looked up in Romeo for most journals, and that means 62% of the immediate deposits can definitely be set to Open Access immediately. The archivist can write to the publisher to double-check the policy if they wish, but meanwhile the deposit should be set as OA for that 62%:

(iii) For the remaining 38% of immediate-deposits, set access initially as Closed Access, and let the archivist inquire, if they wish. Meanwhile the Fair Use button will be doing its job.

See: "Get the Institutional Repository Managers Out of the Decision Loop"

Is this [i.e., UL's current policy] right, and if not, is there perhaps a different archive in which I and my colleagues could place our articles? I have several colleagues who are keen on this idea but are not attracted by the very partial solution available locally.

The Leicester Archive policy is very wrong on this score. I urge you to take it up with the administration, because currently they are shooting themselves in the foot, gratuitously, with this flawed policy, so easily corrected.

Yes, there are other Archives (e.g. Depot or CogPrints) you could deposit it in, but it would be a great pity if Leicester did not sort out its own deposit policy, as it is so simple to do: I. All manuscripts should be deposited immediately.

II. Not only the archivists but the authors should be able to deposit, as they can in virtually all of the other IRs worldwide. Almost no IR restricts depositing to proxy archivists (and those few that do are making a big mistake in imposing this needless and counterproductive restriction).

III. If there are worries about rights, check Romeo, and, if the archivist wishes, also write to the publisher. But meanwhile, deposit immediately and set Access as Closed Access if in doubt.

IV. Implement the "Fair Use" Button.

V. Adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) policy.

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Professor Diana Kornbrot of the University of Hertfordshire added:

I am having similar problems at University of Hertfordshire.
Is there somewhere a draft code of practice or policy (e.g. How is it done at Southampton) that we could all show to our Univ admin people?

Yes there is a draft code of practice!

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

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Universities are invited to use this document to help encourage the adoption of an Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at their institution. Note that this recommended "Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access" (IDOA) policy model (also called the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") has been specifically formulated to be immune from any delays or embargoes (based on publisher policy or copyright restrictions): Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions; but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible (immediately wherever possible, and otherwise preferably with a maximal embargo cap at 6 months).
    This IDOA policy is greatly preferable to, and far more effective than a policy that allows delayed deposit (embargo) or opt-out as determined by publisher policy or copyright restrictions. The restrictions apply only to the access-setting, not to the deposit, which must be immediate. Closed Access deposit is purely an institution-internal book-keeping matter, with the institution's own assets, and no publisher policy or copyright restriction applies to it.
    [In the meanwhile, if there needs to be an embargo period, the IR software has a semi-automated EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button that allows any would-be user to request (by entering their email address and clicking) and then allows any author to provide (by simply clicking on a URL that appears in the eprint request received by email) a single copy of the deposited draft, by email, on an individual basis (a practice that falls fully under Fair Use). This provides almost-immediate, almost-Open Access to tide over research usage needs during any Closed Access period.]

2. Professor Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, which has an OA self-archiving mandate (designed by Prof. Sale) has also provided a "Generic Risk Analysis of Open Access For Your Institution".

3. Model policies for research funders have also been drafted (collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad, by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement).

4. And here is the OA Self-Archiving Policy of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (the first OA self-archiving mandate - from 2001):

1. It is our policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of our research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.
1a. It is also our policy to minimise the effort that each of us has to expend in order to provide open online access to our research output: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
1b. With all our research output accessible online we will be able to respond to the research assessment and other administrative initiatives with minimal input and effort from individual staff.
2. We have accordingly adopted the policy that all research output is to be self-archived in the departmental EPrint Archive before and after peer-reviewed publication. This archive forms the official record of the Department's research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source.
3. Our policy is compatible with publishers' copyright agreements as follows:
3a. The copyright for the unrefereed preprint resides entirely with the author before it is submitted for peer-reviewed publication, hence it can be self-archived irrespective of the copyright policy of the journal to which it is eventually submitted.
3b. The copyright for the peer-reviewed postprint will depend on the wording of the copyright agreement which the author signs with the publisher.
3c. Many publishers will allow the peer-reviewed postprint to be self-archived. The copyright transfer agreement will either specify this right explicitly or the author can inquire about it directly. If you are uncertain about the terms of your agreement, a directory of journal self-archiving policies -- http://romeo.eprints.org -- is available to guide you. Wherever possible, you are advised to modify your copyright agreement so that it does not disallow self-archiving.
3d. In the rare case where you have signed a very restrictive copyright transfer form in which you have agreed explicitly not to self-archive the peer-reviewed postprint, you are encouraged to self-archive, alongside your already-archived preprint, a "corrigenda" file, listing the substantive changes the user would need to make in order to turn the unrefereed preprint into the refereed postprint.
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.
4. We do not require you to archive the full text of books or research monographs. It is sufficient to archive the references along with the usual metadata.
5. Some journals still maintain submission policies which state that a preprint will not be considered for publication if it has been previously 'publicised' by making it accessible online. Unlike copyright transfer agreements, such policies are not a matter of law. If you have concerns about submitting an archived paper to a journal which still maintains such a restrictive submission policy, please discuss it with the Department's IPR and Copyright Advisor.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) did not "sell out" to Elsevier in agreeing to pay for Open Access publication charges in exchange for compliance with their (very welcome and timely) Open Access mandate. They (and the Wellcome Trust) simply made a strategic mistake -- but a mistake that no one at HHMI (or Wellcome) as yet seems ready to re-think and remedy:

What HHMI should have done was to mandate that all HHMI fundees must deposit the final, accepted, peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints") of all their published articles in their own institution's Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Instead, they uncritically followed the (somewhat incoherent) "e-biomed" model, and mandated that it must be deposited directly in PubMed Central, a central, 3rd-party repository, within 6 months of publication.

The reason this was a mistake (and the reason it is silly to keep harping on HHMI's "selling out") is that all Elsevier journals, including Cell Press, are already "Green" on immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR: It is only 3rd-party archiving that they object to (as rival publication).

But there is no reason whatsoever to hold out (or pay) for direct deposit in a central repository: All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Hence any central repository can harvest their metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.) and simply link it to the full-text in the author's own IR. (Oaister, Scirus, Scopus, Google, Google Scholar, etc. can of course also harvest and link for search and retrieval).

So in exchange for their unnecessary and arbitrary insistence on having the full-text deposited directly in PubMed Central within six months of publication, HHMI (and Wellcome, and other followers of this flawed model) have agreed instead to pay arbitrary, inflated, and unnecessary "Gold" OA publication charges. That would in itself be fine, and simply a waste of money, if it did not set an extremely bad example for other research funders and institutions, who are also looking to mandate OA self-archiving, but do not have the spare change to pay for such extravagant and gratuitous expenses.

Below is Cell Press's Self-Archiving policy:

Authors' rights (Cell Press):

"As an author you (or your employer or institution) may do the following:

"...Post a revised personal version of the final text (including illustrations and tables) of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on your personal or your institutional website or server, with a link (through the relevant DOI) to the article as published, provided that such postings are not for commercial purposes..."

See also:

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

Double-Paying for Optional Gold OA Instead of Mandating Green OA While Subscriptions Are Still Paying for Publication: Trojan Folly

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: This is a reply to Matt Hodgkinson's posting in his journalology blog:
(1) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a compromise deliberately designed to end deadlocks delaying the adoption of self-archiving mandates, by making publisher copyright policies or embargoes moot. It is not a substitute for OA but an accelerator toward OA.
(2) There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) . The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited.
(3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep perseverating with Gold OA and costs while usage and impact continue to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can already put an immediate end to that loss, once and for all, right now.
(4) CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields.
(5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs.
(6) I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), especially mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs.
(7) I have no wish to vye for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art.
(8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it.

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Bill Hooker has already corrected the two main misunderstandings in Matt Hodgkinson's posting:

(1) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a compromise deliberately designed to end deadlocks that have been delaying the adoption of self-archiving mandates for several years now, by making the issue of publisher copyright policies or embargoes moot if they are holding up the adoption of a full Green OA mandate. Green OA is still Green OA (immediate, direct, full access) but an ID/OA compromise mandate now is infinitely preferable to no self-archiving mandate at all. And together with the "Fair-Use" Button, ID/OA provides almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period. (And, yes, I do add the speculation that ID/OA, once universally adopted, will very soon lead to the welcome death of embargoes, and hence to 100% Green OA; but nothing hangs on this speculation: It is an ID/OA mandate that should be adopted if there is deadlock or delay in agreeing on the adoption of a Green OA mandate.)

(2) All articles deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) will be harvested and indexed by OAIster, Google Scholar, and many other harvesters and search engines. There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited. The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited (i.e., 85% of the annual peer-reviewed journal literature) and the solution is to mandate Green OA -- or, failing that, to mandate ID/OA. Hence 100% Green OA will indeed have delivered OA's goal, irrespective of whether and when it goes on to lead to Gold OA.

A few other points:

(3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep fussing about Gold OA and costs while daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact continues to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can put an end to it. My objection to Gold fever is a matter of immediate priorities. It is not only putting the Golden cart before the Green horse (or counting the Golden chickens before the Green eggs are laid), but it is leaving us year in and year out at a near-standstill, whereas self-archiving mandates have been demonstrated to fast-forward universities toward 100% OA for their output within two years. (See Arthur Sale's splendid studies.)

(4) I criticise the CERN Gold OA initiative for much the same reason: CERN could have done so much more. CERN has a successful Green OA mandate (not even the ID/OA compromise) and CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields. (Saving subscription costs is utterly irrelevant once you have 100% Green OA: Journal subscriptions then become optional luxury items instead of basic necessities, as now.)

(5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal like Springer's Open Choice is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs, and hence doubly foolish. (Rationalizing that it can be corrected by "adjustments" in the subscription price is not only credulous in the extreme, but it blithely countenances locking in current asking-prices in a way that makes the "Big Deal" look like chump change.) Paying for Gold OA in a pure-Gold journal (like the BMC and PLoS journals) -- when one can simply publish in any journal and self-archive to provide OA -- is merely foolish (except for those with a lot of spare change). (At this time: not if and when 100% Green OA causes unsustainable institutional subscription cancellations, thereby releasing the funds to pay for institutional Gold OA publishing costs. (But -- speculation again -- it is likely that journals will have to cut costs and downsize in converting to Gold OA, so the asking price for Gold OA will not be what it is now.)

(6) I do not criticise depositing in Central Repositories (CRs) per se (though I do think it is foolish): I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), and I especially criticise mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs. Institutions are the primary research providers. IRs tile all of OA output space. Institutions and their researchers have a shared interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their own research output. Institutions can mandate, monitor (and even monetarize) self-archiving in their own IRs (and funders can reinforce those mandates); CRs cannot. And CRs can harvest from IRs if they wish. Mandating self-archiving in researchers' own IRs is the systematic and scaleable -- hence optimal -- solution for generating 100% OA, not a panoply of arbitrary CRs criss-crossing research space.

(7) I have no interest in vying for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art. I don't doubt that the descriptor "open access" can be googled before the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative decided (quite consciously, after surveying several alternatives) to adopt OA for the movement to which it subsequently gave rise. Before the BOAI, there was no OA movement, just a lot of notions in the air, among them: free online access, self-archiving, and journals funded by means other than the subscription model.

(8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it, at the current rate. Green OA, in contrast, can be accelerated to reach 100% within two years, if we just go ahead and mandate it, instead of continuing to fuss about Gold OA!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Springer Open Choice offers authors the choice of paying for Optional Gold OA: While all publication costs are still being paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors can pay Springer $3000 extra to make their article (Gold) OA for them.
   But there is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are still paying all publication costs. Researchers' institutions and funders should instead mandate that their researchers self-archive their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to make them (Green) OA.
   Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which the publishing industry should have no say whatsoever. The way to remove the publishing industry lobby from this research-community decision loop is the pro-tem compromise -- wherever there is any delay in adopting an OA self-archiving mandate -- of weakening the mandate into an immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA), so that it can be adopted without any further delay.
   (Such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate in all cases, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)

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Jan Velterop of Springer Open Choice continues to campaign for double-paid OA: With publication costs all paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors pay $3000 extra in order to provide Open-Choice Gold OA for their own article.

I continue to advocate that authors self-archive (and that their institutions and funders mandate that they self-archive) their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to provide Green OA. There is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are paying all publication costs.

Sixty-two percent of journals (including all 502 Springer journals) already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving. Yet the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates has been delayed far too long already by publishers either lobbying against self-archiving mandates, or adopting self-archiving embargoes, or both.

In order to put an end to all further delay in the adoption of self-archiving mandates, publishers need to be taken out of this research-community decision loop altogether. Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which publishers should have no say whatsoever.

The way to put an end to the publisher filibuster on Green OA self-archiving mandates is the pro-tem compromise of weakening the mandates into immediate-deposit/optional-access mandates (ID/OA), so that they can be adopted without any further delay. This immunizes them from any further attempts by publishers to prevent or delay adoption: Only deposit is mandated (immediately). Access to the immediate deposit can then either be set as Open Access immediately, or (in case of a publisher embargo), as Closed Access, provisionally, with almost-OA provided by the "Fair Use" Button during any embargo.

This way we have universal immediate-deposit, now, and almost-immediate almost-OA, now. 100% OA can and will follow soon after.

(Note also that such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)

But Jan Velterop (JV) is not concerned about this. He has a product to sell:

JV: "It almost looks as if there is a new OA sprout on the stem: 'almost-OA'."

No new sprout on the stem: Just a temporary compromise in order to usher in universal self-archiving mandates without any further possibility of delay by publishers.

What is strongly recommended is immediate OA self-archiving. But what is mandated is immediate deposit.

Universal immediate-deposit mandates mean immediate OA for at least 62% of articles, and, with the help of the "Fair Use" Button, almost-immediate, almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (For the time being. Embargoes will disappear very soon thereafter, under pressure from the powerful, propagating benefits of universal OA.)

Jan would like to disparage this in order to promote paying for $3000 Open Choice Gold OA. He is free to promote his product, of course, but he is in competition with good sense, which can be promoted too:

JV: "This 'almost-OA', metadata plus a 'fair-use button', has of course been there for a long time already -- almost 15 years, I would say (and much longer if one considers the pre-web era). And it's been there without almost any self-archiving of almost any kind. Go to almost any publisher's web site, and you'll find the metadata for any article, plus a 'fair-use button' (usually, -- dare I say almost always? -- in the guise of an email address represented by an icon that looks like an envelope). Establishing repositories and a deposit mandate may be desired for many reasons, but if their main goal is to achieve 'almost-OA' it rather seems a waste of time and money."

Jan misses two fundamental and obvious differences here: (1) Author self-archiving places the article in the author's own Institutional Repository, not a publisher's proprietary paid-access website and (2) the Fair Use Button does not merely offer the author's email address: The requester pastes in his own email address and clicks and the author gets an automatic email with the request and a URL, which he need merely click to have the eprint automatically emailed to the requester.

That, dear Jan, is the difference between night and day; the difference between a system whose goal is 100% OA and a system whose goal is to get paid for yet another thing (even when all bills are already paid and all expenses are already covered).

No, the immediate-deposit mandate plus the Button is not yet 100% OA. But it's close; and 100% immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button will soon lead to 100% OA. The delayed deposits (or no deposits at all) for which some publishers are lobbying never will. The double-paid Open Choice Gold OA even less so.

OA advocates are for OA; just OA. Open-Choice Gold advocates seem more intent on more-pay than OA...

JV: "OA publishing, on the other hand, delivers not 'almost-OA', but true and immediate OA (whether or not the articles are deposited in a repository, which is, by the way, automatically done by the full and hybrid OA publishers I am familiar with)."

Green OA delivers "true and immediate" OA. It is publisher embargoes that reduce it to almost-OA! But that's fine. The research community will already be incomparably better off with Green OA for 62% of its articles and almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (Springer journals are among the 62% that endorse immediate Green OA, but, before you say it, yes, even if Springer and others choose to renege, universal almost-OA will be incomparably preferable to the status quo -- and it won't have the deterrent of costing an extra $3000 per article, while subscriptions are still paying all the publishing costs.)

And universal almost-OA, through universal immediate-deposit mandates, will very soon bring on 100% OA.

JV: "So my advice to authors who want secure, sustainable, future-proof, easy OA, is to publish with OA, in a journal that gives that opportunity, be it a new OA journal that only accepts OA articles, or an established and trusted 'hybrid' journal, that offers the OA choice."

And my advice to authors is to self-archive in their institutional repositories no matter what else they do -- and to pay for Gold OA only if and when they can afford it, and feel it's worth the extra price.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Below is a posting, with permission, of an offline exchange with Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice. I have labelled the dramatis personae and indented for chronology. (The title "Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice" is mine, not Jan's.)

Jan argues that paying for Open Choice Gold OA at this time, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing, would not be double-paying for OA.

I argue that it would be.

Jan argues that mandating Green OA -- as ERC, ARC, NHMRC, 5 RCUK research councils, and a growing number of universities have done, and as FRPAA, NIH, EC, CIHR and EURAB propose to do -- will destroy journals and peer review.

I argue that it will provide OA -- and that if it ever does cause subscription cancellation, then that will be the time to convert to Gold OA, paying the institutional Gold OA publishing costs out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings themselves, rather than pre-emptively double-paying, as we would be doing if we did it now, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing.

(I will let Jan have the last word in this posting and will reply separately to a few of his points in my next posting. My surmise is that the careful reader of this exchange will not need my subsequent reply -- though this surmise could be wrong.)

Stevan Harnad

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From: Jan Velterop (VELTEROP)
To: Stevan Harnad (HARNAD)

HARNAD: Jan, may I post this? I've removed the nonsubstantive parts that do not need not be aired in public. Chrs, S

VELTEROP: Stevan, If you include my further comments, you may post. Best, Jan

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On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK wrote:

HARNAD: The main substantive points are: (1) Paying for optional OA Gold today is double-paying...

VELTEROP: Answer: Nonsense. Paying for access to content is not the same as paying for having your article published with OA. At no point is the same article paid for twice.

HARNAD: Can we count this up, slowly:

(a) A journal sells subscriptions.

(b) Subscriptions cover publication costs plus profits. Let's say $3000 per article published.

(c) That same journal now begins to offer Open Choice: $1500 to make your article free online, instead of having it accessible only to those with a paid subscription.

In what sense is the publication of that article not being double-paid for?

VELTEROP: That's clear to anyone who understands how journals work: The open access articles are simply not part of the subscription. As if they were published in a 'parallel' journal with the same editor and editorial board. This doesn't only happen to open acces articles, but publishing history is strewn with sponsored supplementary material that, whilst carrying a journal's mark, was made available for free and not part of a subscription.

HARNAD: (Please don't reply that the author is not paying twice. I of course meant the publisher is being paid twice.)

VELTEROP: Of course authors are not paying twice. Authors, and readers for that matter, are rarely paying at all. That's all done vicariously by the institution, mostly the library. And the publisher is not paid twice for the same thing, however much you twist it.

HARNAD: And recall that this is all being rehearsed in the context of the claim that Green self-archiving would destroy journals because it would destroy their subscription base and no longer make it possible to pay the costs of publishing.

To which my reply has always been that subscriptions pay the cost of publishing, and if and when subscriptions are cancelled, hence no longer paying the cost of publishing, then the cancellation savings can be redirected to pay for the cost of publishing. Before that, publishing is being double-paid for.

VELTEROP: I know that your reply has always been thus. That doesn't make it correct. I'm not denying that there may be a cost of transition from subscriptions to gold OA. That's been highlighted many times before, notably by PLoS before they even were publishers themselves. Your method has a cost as well. A much greater one. You favour, by implication, although you refuse to see it that way, the demise of journals, and with that the destruction of a system and infrastructure of peer-reviewed publishing. Of course that can be built up again after the existing journals have gone out of business. But it will take a very long time. The benefits of OA are substantial, but that price, making the transition of one phase to the next via a phase of destruction, is too high in my view. That's why I favour a transition without such drastic drawbacks.

HARNAD: Hence authors should self-archive (Green), not pay for Gold, now (for a hybrid Open Choice journal: if they wish to publish in a pure Gold journal, like BMC or PLoS, they are not double-paying).

VELTEROP: In what way is Open Choice different from 'pure' gold? Have you forgotten that 'open access' was explicitly declared a property of an article, not of a journal or a publisher? (look here if you need to refresh your memory). Why not pay for gold? Why are you making such an issue of that? Are you the guardian angel of university administrators and research funders now, too? How would paying for gold threaten your cherished self-archiving? Did it escape your attention that gold is green plus a lot more? When your campaign for self-archiving was just that, it at least had the benefit of an intellectually honest quest. Now that you are showing a keen interest in making any transition impossible unless via destruction, using financial arguments, you've lost your focus, and, in my view, your credibility. For the avoidance of doubt: I'm not against green. What I think is not a good idea is mandates for self-archiving. If they are successful (and why else would they be proposed), they carry too high a price, as I explained above.

VELTEROP: Consider this analogy: you take a subscription to a newspaper and subsequently you wish to place an ad in it. You'll be asked to pay for the placement of the ad. In your reasoning this would mean that you'd be double-paying. You may be paying more than you did before, but you'd be paying for different things. To call it double-paying is misleading.

HARNAD: I'm afraid I don't see the analogy at all. The crucial difference is that my own article is my ad, and I am saying that that ad's author (me) should be mandated (by his employer/funder) to put a supplementary copy of his own ads online for free, not pay their publishers to do it, while their publishers are still being fully paid by their subscribers. They don't need more money from me, to do what they are doing already, plus what I can do for myself, for free (without "destroying the newspaper").

VELTEROP: As I indicated, analogies are not perfect. In the case of an article (your 'ad'), it gains quite a lot by being published in the journal. What you are doing, is taking that 'gain', without bothering to care how that gain is acquired and paid for (other than throwing the ball into the librarian's court and say: "you paid for it in the past and you shall keep paying for it in the future, and if not, there will be some 'deus ex machina' salvaging any ailing journal"), and attach it to your self-archived copy. You can, at any time, publish your article online. When you need the journal 'label' to give it professional credibility is when you go to a publisher. Not giving him your article, mind you, but asking for a service. Performing that service costs money and subscriptions are a poor way of providing that money. Article processing charges are much better because they remove any need to restrict access in any way.

VELTEROP: Analogies, as always, are not perfect. Unlike the newspaper analogy, and for Academia as a whole, any 'extra' payment is temporary.

HARNAD: It sounds here as if you are conceding, after all, that there is double-payment being received...

VELTEROP: Of course there is a cost of transition, as I said above. But that's a cost of transition, not paying twice for the same thing. The cost of transition your method incurs, destruction of the journal infrastructure, is much greater.

VELTEROP: This is unfortunate, but a consequence of a drawn-out transition in which not all libraries in one go switch from subscriptions to article charges as a way of sustaining peer-reviewed journals.

HARNAD: We are not talking about changing the ways subscribing libraries sustain peer-reviewed journals. We are talking about supplementing subscription access with author-provided free online access, today. If there is indeed one day to be a transition to Gold OA, let that transition be driven by cancellations, and funded by the cancellation savings, not pre-empted now, by double-payment (and at a price that may well be a good deal higher than it will be if the transition is preceded and driven by Green OA).

VELTEROP: Who is 'we' here? I am indeed talking about changing ways of sustaining peer-reviewed journals. Your idea of having any transition funded by cancellation savings is predicated (without realising it, I suspect) on the completely unrealistic premise that all journals are being published by this one 'Ueber-publisher'. Any librarian who thinks he's double paying, can just cancel whatever he feels he can afford to cancel and re-use the funds for OA publishing. Any funder who thinks there is a risk of double payment can stipulate that out of the 58% of overheads typically taken off research grants, OA publishing is paid in the form of article processing charges, instead of non-OA publishing in the form of subscriptions.

VELTEROP: At our initiative, we are in active discussion with a number of library consortia and some major research and funding institutions to find proper ways of avoiding any double payment, if and where it might occur. I'll announce them as soon as the ink is dry.

HARNAD: If institutional libraries are foolish enough to prepay the asking price for Gold now, by redirecting all their subscription budgets, there will not be a single murmur of protest from me if both the publishers support and the libraries' institutions adopt a Green OA mandate.

But if this absurd bargain is made in place of a Green OA mandate, I shall certainly do my level best to make all parties see the folly of their ways.

VELTEROP: What's 'absurd' about working on a sustainable way to make the transition from subscriptions without OA, to OA publishing?

HARNAD: (2) For a Gold (or hybrid Gold) OA publisher to oppose Green OA mandates is, at best, to oppose OA...

VELTEROP: Answer: This is weird reasoning, Stevan, and repeating it doesn't make it any better. We're gold, we're green (and by the way, gold includes green - not the other way around), and we feel that mandates should not be employed in the innately liberal world of science.

HARNAD: If Springer were (as it is) Green (i.e., endorses immediate Green self-archiving) and did not at the same time try to oppose Green OA mandates (as Springer does), then we would be in the scenario I described above, and Springer would not be blame-worthy (for trying to make an extra buck): only the institutions who took Springer up on it without mandating Green OA would be balmy.

VELTEROP: Feel free to keep on calling institutions and funders 'balmy', authors 'stupid' or 'ignorant', publishers 'blame-worthy', et cetera, but don't expect to be taken seriously.

VELTEROP: If a cultural norm emerges, like is the case with having to publish with peer-review, then fine. And if, and only if, a mandate is deemed justifiable, then it should be a mandate for open access, not a mandate for open access by such or such a means.

HARNAD: Researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals. That's a given. Journals recover their peer-review costs from subscriptions. That's a current fact. Alongside that, and (until/unless there are unsustainable cancellations as a result), mandating Green OA self-archiving is a completely independent matter, a matter that is entirely between an author and his institution or funder. Publishers should have no say in it whatsoever. (And, a fortiori, no say in the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate [ID/OA], which doesn't even notionally need the publisher's blessing or endorsement for the deposit.)

VELTEROP: Much of the added value of a journal is concentrated in its 'trademark' attached to the article. This trademark, and therefore its added value, is easily pilfered. This is a problem for publishers, of course. And a lot of thinking goes into how to deal with that. If you were to argue for a self-archiving mandate for articles without indicating where and when they were published, in other words without appropriating the 'gain' while not taking responsibility for supporting the way this gain is generated, then that would be fine.

PS. Where not explicitly stated that I do speak for Springer, I speak for myself.

Jan Velterop

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VELTEROP: I didn't argue for mandating direct deposit in a CR

HARNAD: (Sorry: When you singled out IRs as one of my "orthodoxies" I thought you were defending direct deposit in CRs (as BMC does). I withdraw those points.)

VELTEROP: You should feel free to post this