Open Access Archivangelism

Everything that Bob Campbell writes in his Wiley Exchanges article "Open Access in the UK – will Gold or Green prevail?" -- where he puts the emphasis, and how he spins it -- is entirely predictable. As a publisher, Bob's paramount concern is in ensuring that the cash keeps flowing, whether from subscriptions, hybrid Gold, or pure Gold. This is understandable.

The research community's paramount concern, in contrast, is with giving and getting Open Access to their refereed research. That means mostly Green OA self-archiving, and Bob has no particular interest in Green ("repositories" -- why should he?), except to conflate no-embargo publishers with one-year embargo publishers as both being "one-year-or-less embargo-publishers."

And to conflate subscription journals that offer hybrid Gold as an option with pure-Gold journals as both being "Gold-or-hybrid-Gold" journals: 70% already! We're almost there…!

Except that it's nothing of the sort (and I rather suspect that the 70% refers to publishers that offer hybrid Gold, not journals). And that means that even if only one (or not even one) of the articles in one of a publisher's fleet of (say) 2000 journals offering the hybrid option is actually paid/made hybrid Gold, then all those 2000 journals are part of the happy 70%...

Bob also slips and slides on double-dipping, saying that if publication costs are paid for via subscriptions, for institutional access, and then some of those same articles are again paid for via hybrid Gold fees, for worldwide access, then that's not double-dipping: that's just fair payment for two different products!

To be fair, though, the impatient rights-rhapsodists -- who scorn mere Green and insist instead on re-use rights, at all costs (CC-BY-all-means), right now -- do provide Bob with the ideal pretext for claiming that hybrid Gold is indeed paying for a further product after all (82%!)...

(The self-serving calculations are somewhat reminiscent of a beleaguered MP seeking re-election in a faltering constituency.)

Having formally stated since 2004 that Elsevier authors retain the right to self-archive their final, refereed, revised, accepted drafts, unembargoed, in their institutional OA repositories, Elsevier has tried to imply that the author's institution somehow does not have the right to host that draft, if it mandates self-archiving!.

And Elsevier tries to bring this up, not in its public negotiations with its authors, but in its confidential private negotiations with institutions, in the context of Big-Deal pricing agreements.

(Institutions should of course politely decline to discuss university self-archiving policy in any way, in their journal pricing negotiations with Elsevier or any other publisher.)

Just as it makes no sense (hence carries no legal force) to say to Elsevier authors that they retain the right to self-archive in their institutional repositories "voluntarily" but not "mandatorily," it makes no sense to say that if authors' institutions mandate self-archiving, then they may not host the self-archiving that their Elsevier authors formally retain the right to do in their institutional repositories.

And "systematicity" as a grounds for over-riding the Elsevier author's retained right to self-archive unembargoed is just as nonsensical (hence non-binding) at the host-institution level, particularly since Elsevier has (wisely) conceded the right of all its authors to self-archive in arXiv (as they have been doing since 1991).

Arxiv, a global repository in which close to 100% of the articles in several subdisciplines of physics, mathematics and astrophysics are accessible is indeed a systematic collection of Elsevier journal content.

But no individual institution, hosting its own tiny, arbitrary fragment of global journal output can be faintly construed as a "systematic collection" of Elsevier content, any more than any individual author's collection of his own self-archived articles can be.

So here too, Elsevier authors can and should safely ignore the FUD and double-talk and self-archive their final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon publication, just as they have been doing since 2004.

Alas, the well-meaning Euroscientist article "Open access in Europe: the bear and the tortoise" is replete with the most common misunderstandings of open access (OA) -- the very same misunderstandings that have kept OA from happening for so many years since it first came within reach.

Despite many hopeful announcements, no OA tipping point has yet been reached. (It isn't even clear what "tipping point" means, if it doesn't mean crossing a threshold as of which 100% OA is within sight and fast approaching.)

ERC "joining" Arxiv means providing partial payment to support the costs of a global repository that has been at the disposition of researchers worldwide since 1991. But it's still only those researchers (mostly physicists and mathematicians) who have been depositing in Arxiv all along who continue to deposit in Arxiv. No tipping point in sight there, for the rest of the disciplines and the rest of the world.

If 62% of ERC-funded articles are OA it is because ERC has mandated OA (but the figure needs to distinguish OA itself, which needs to be immediate, from Delayed Access, which might be 6-12-24 months or even longer, after publication).

The EU Horizon 2020 Framework, too, must clarify and shore up its mandate on the question of the timing of the deposit as well as the timing of access.

Recommendations, Declarations, Statements, Invitations and Incentives to provide OA are very welcome, but alas they do not generate OA itself. Only effective OA mandates, adopted and implemented by research institutions, research funders and universities generate OA. And OA mandates are still few and (more to the point): far too weak (see ROARMAP).

No, the real problem is not the possibility that publishers' copyright agreements with authors can still embargo OA for 6-12-24 months or longer. The problem is that most OA mandates fail to mandate immediate deposit anyway, irrespective of how long they allow access to the immediate-deposit to be embargoed by the publisher. Once authors have done an immediate-deposit, the repositories have a Button that makes it possible to provide almost-immediate almost-OA during any allowable embargo period with one click from the would-user and one click from the author.

The UK, the worldwide OA leader since 2004, has not taken "significant steps" forward on OA recently, but significant steps backward. (The Finch Report and the new RCUK OA mandate "prefers" double-paying to publish in gold OA journals instead of letting UK authors continue to publish in their preferred journals and provide green OA by self-archiving in their institutional repositories). Other countries are in fact doing much better than the UK, most notably Belgium, with the Liège model OA green OA mandate -- the one that all institutions and funders worldwide should be adopting. It requires immediate deposit in the institutional repository as the means of submitting work for research evaluation, and as a condition for research funding.

It is good that the Science Europe Statement favours OA, but as noted, the past decade has demonstrated unequivocally that statements are not enough: Effective green OA mandates (the Liège model) are needed (and the Science Europe Statement is not even a statement in favour of effective green OA mandates). Much more clarity, focus, and specificity are needed in order to get this job done.

And the first step is to stop saying and thinking that the difference between "gold OA" (publishing) and "green OA" self-archiving is that gold means instant OA whereas green means OA within 6 months: Gold OA requires authors to change journals and pay to publish. Green OA allows authors to continue to publish where they choose, at no cost, and to provide immediate Almost-OA regardless of whether and how long a publisher OA embargo is allowed. (And 60% of publishers do not embargo OA at all.)

Yes, developing countries could in principle outpace the EU and the US in providing OA to their own research output, but what both the developing countries and the EU and US need most is access to all of one another's research output -- and most urgently to the research output of EU and the US. Moreover, most developing countries are not yet outpacing the EU and the US in providing OA to their own research output.

The obstacles to OA have nothing to do with the (legitimate) need and desire of researchers to meet the quality standards of the top journals in their fields. And the solution is not just "incentives and support" (already tried many times, many places) but the universal adoption of an effective OA mandate, which is the Liège mandate -- and green.

Alessandro Sarretta asked:

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"In a blog post you said that 'Elsevier is fully green - Fully green means the refereed, revised, accepted final draft is openly accessible'

"This is correct reading this Elsevier web page that seems an old one._

"But reading the current Article Elsevier posting policy web page, it says:

Pre-print Definition: A preprint is an author’s own write-up of research results and analysis that has not been peer-reviewed, nor had any other value added to it by a publisher (such as formatting, copy editing, technical enhancement etc...).

Elsevier's Policy: An author may use the preprint for personal use, internal institutional use and for permitted scholarly posting.

In general, Elsevier is permissive with respect to authors and electronic preprints. If an electronic preprint of an article is placed on a public server prior to its submission to an Elsevier journal or where a paper was originally authored as a thesis or dissertation, this is not generally viewed by Elsevier as “prior publication” and therefore Elsevier will not require authors to remove electronic preprints of an article from public servers should the article be accepted for publication in an Elsevier journal.

"So the pre-print shall "not have been peer-reviewed"... Could you share your opinion on that?"

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What matters is the postprint (the "Accepted Author Manuscript [AAM]") not the unrefereed preprint.

Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs [Accepted Author Manuscripts] for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution’s repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs... Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisher’s policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

Please see my prior analyses of this Elsevier double-talk about authors retaining the right to make their AAMs OA in their institutional repositories "voluntarily," but not if their institutions mandate it "systematically." Here's a summary:

1. The author-side distinction between an author's self-archiving voluntarily and mandatorily is pseudo-legal nonsense: All authors can assert, safely and truthfully, that whatever they do, they do "voluntarily."

2. The institution-side distinction between voluntary and "systematic" self-archiving by authors has nothing to do with rights agreements between the author and Elsevier: It is an attempt by Elsevier to create a contingency between (a) its "Big Deal" journal pricing negotiations with an institution and (b) that institution's self-archiving policies. Institutions should of course decline to discuss their self-archiving policies in any way in their pricing negotiations with any publisher.

3. "Systematicity" (if it means anything at all) means systematically collecting, reconstructing and republishing the contents of a journal -- presumably on the part of a rival, free-riding publisher hurting the original publisher's revenues; this would constitute a copyright violation on the part of the rival systematic, free-riding publisher, not the author: An institution does nothing of the sort (any more than an individual self-archiving author does). The institutional repository contains only the institution's own tiny random fragment of any individual journal's annual contents. (ArXiv, in contrast, unlike an institutional repository, is indeed a systematic collection of all or almost all the articles in a number of physics and maths journals: Elsevier hence endorses Green OA self-archiving in arXiv, because although it is systematic, it is "voluntary." The pseudo-distinction is hence that although Green OA self-archiving in a mandated institutional repository is not systematic, it can be embargoed despite the fact that all Elsevier authors retain the right to self-archive in their institutional repositories, because it is not "voluntary.")

All of the above is in any case completely mooted if an institution adopts the ID/OA mandate, because that mandate only requires that the deposit be made immediately, not that it be made OA immediately. (If the author wishes to comply with a publisher OA embargo policy -- which Elsevier does not have -- the repository's "Almost-OA" eprint-request Button can tide over researcher needs during any OA embargo with one click from the requestor and one click from the author.)

Bjorn Brembs: "What you're saying here is that cancellations now are premature, because too few articles are actually available in green repositories? That libraries should hold off because otherwise we face access problems? If that is what you are saying here, then it may be worth spelling it out more clearly as for me that was not immediately obvious. Unintended consequences in publisher behavior (as you allude to above) aside, what is your opinion on using the funds of canceled subscriptions to improve repository functionality to improve green acess? This should only mean a brief interruption of service for much improved access shortly thereafter and a speeding up of the transition you envisage?"

1. Cancelling journals because their policies are Green -- i.e., because they do not embargo Green OA self-archiving -- is both absurd and destructive: It simply encourages journals to adopt embargoes.

2. Cancelling journals because (some of) their articles are Green is premature and self-defeating: Less than 20% of journal articles are unembargoed Green (i.e., immediate) OA today, and they are distributed randomly across all journals. Hence to cancel any particular journal because the proportion of its articles that is available Green today exceeds this global average is, again, just to penalize that journal, perversely (as well as jeopardizing the growth of Green OA itself, gratuitously).

The time to consider cancelling journals is once Green OA mandates and hence Green OA are at or near 100% globally, and hence the proportion of journal articles that are green OA is at or near 100%. At this point all journals will be at or near 100% and the global cancellation pressure will affect all of them, forcing them all to cut inessential costs, downsize, and convert to Fair Gold OA. (Then -- and only then -- is the time to redirect a fraction of each institution's annual subscription cancellation windfall savings to pay the much-reduced Fair-Gold publication fees for the institution's authors' own annual article output, affordably and sustainably. Trying instead to start doing this now, pre-emptively -- while percentage Green is still low, Green growth is still slow and unstable, subscriptions to core journals still have to be paid, and Fool's Gold is still over-priced and double-paid (and double-dipped, if hybrid Fool's-Gold) -- would be a profound failure to think ahead.

In sum, to cancel journals now based on the percentage of their articles that are accessible as Green OA now would be as as short-sighted and futile as it would be counterproductive: Like the Finch Fiasco and Stevan Harnad in Publishing Costs at 15:56 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Mike Taylor wrote:

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MT: "Where have the Wellcome Trust opposed mandating immediate-deposit Green? I don’t see how the fact that they pay their grantees’ Gold APCs implies any objection to people taking other routes. Unless they’ve said something that I missed."

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In their recommendations and support for the Finch Report, which declared Green ineffective and recommended downgrading it to preservation archiving instead of OA. See:

On Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) on Finch Report and RCUK Mandate

RCUK: Don't Follow the Wellcome Trust OA Policy Model!

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MT: "My own position, stated several times, is that I’ve got no very strong preference for either Gold or Green, caring much more about Open Access. I do think there are advantages to Gold, and that our current Green infrastructure needs a lot of work, but those are minor issues compared with the big one of open vs. non-open."

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The advantages you see in Gold lie in your preferred definition of OA (and of "open" vs. "non-open"). And we are talking about Green OA and Gold OA, not Green and Gold. Your preferences are hence camouflaged by using the terminology generically.

There are, as you know, two kinds or degrees of OA:

Gratis OA: Free online access

Libre OA: Free online access plus certain re-use rights (e.g., CC-BY).

You are an advocate for Libre OA, and when you use the words "OA" and "open" you mean Libre OA.

I am an advocate for Green OA, and have given many reasons -- empirical, logical, strategic and practical -- for why Green, Gratis OA must come first:

1. Gratis OA is a prerequisite of Libre OA.

2. Gratis OA is more urgently needed than Libre OA.

3. Gratis OA is needed by all fields, Libre OA only by some.

4. Gratis OA faces far fewer publisher obstructions than Libre OA (because it is much less of a threat to publishers).

5. Green Gratis OA can be mandated without over-riding author choice of journal, Libre OA cannot.

6. Green Gratis OA entails no extra cost; Libre Gold OA does.

So when you say you have no preference between Green and Gold and what you care about is OA, what you mean is Libre OA, which in turn entails a preference for Gold OA at the expense of Green OA (hence OA).

And that is exactly what you have been defending in your many public postings: You have criticized Green OA mandates for not requiring Green Libre OA (even though such mandates are presently impossible and would lead to author non-compliance and non-feasibility of Green OA mandates) and you have endorsed paying for Libre Gold OA in preference to providing just Gratis Green.

Not only is Libre OA just as premature and out of reach of mandates today as (Fool's) Gold OA (overpriced, double-paid, and, if hybrid, also double-dipped) is out of reach financially today, but even immediate, unembargoed Gratis Green OA is still not quite within reach of mandates yet:

The compromise has to be precisely theLiège-FNRS model immediate-deposit mandates now being recommended by BOAI-10, HOAP, HEFCE and BIS (with the eprint-request Button tiding over user needs during any allowable embargo) first.

Once those mandates are adopted globally, they will not only provide a great deal of (Gratis, Green) immediate-OA (at least 60%), plus Button-mediated Almost-OA for all the rest (40%): with all articles being immediately deposited, and with immediate-OA just one access-setting click away they will also exert mounting global pressure for immediate-OA. And 100% immediate-OA will in turn eventually exert cancelation pressure on publishers, which will force downsizing and conversion to Fair-Gold OA and as much Libre OA as users need and authors wish to provide.

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MT: "What I have been very negative about, and this may be what you’re thinking of, is the specific form of Green that Finch favours, i.e. prohibiting commercial use and in any case embargoes for one to two years. When that is the Green on offer, then yes, I prefer Gold. But the much better Green that the BIS select committee is recommending is much more appealing."

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Yup, I know that's what you prefer! And I've explained why your preferences are not directly realizable above. They are pre-emptive over-reaching. Grasp what's reachable first -- immediate-deposit mandates -- and that will bring the rest of what you seek within reach. Keep counselling unrealistic over-reaching instead, and we'll have yet another decade of next to nothing. First things first.

And that is precisely what BIS (and HEFCE and BOAI-10) are recommending to be mandated (not what you seem to be imagining).

OA mandates can only work if it is in authors' interests to comply willingly: if mandates try to co-opt authors' choice of journals, or cost them money, authors will not comply, and mandates will fail.

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MT: "(For that matter I am also not super-keen on Finch-flavoured Gold, which seems to be £2000 APC fed to double-dipping troll-access publishers.)"

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Even at one quarter the fee, and non-hybrid, the cost would still be double-paid (core-journal institutional subscription payments, uncancelable till their contents are accessible without them + individual author Gold journal APC payments), hence unaffordable Fool's Gold (and hence a disaster for a UK that pays it unilaterally). Only Green OA-induced cancellation pressure can downsize them to Fair Gold.

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Postscript

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MT: "I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make in your last paragraph, so I will simply repeat: we never, ever delete comments because of not agreeing with their message..." [emphasis added]

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...we just ignore them...

Stevan Harnad

It's time for the Wellcome Trust to think more deeply about its endlessly repeated mantra that the "cost of publication is part of the cost of funding research."

The statement is true enough, but profoundly incomplete: As a private foundation, Wellcome only funds researchers' research. It does not have to fund their institutional journal subscriptions, which are currently paying the costs of publication for all non-OA research. And without access to those subscription journals, researchers would lose access to everything that is not yet Open Access (OA) -- which means access to most of currently published research worldwide. Moreover, if those subscriptions stopped being paid, no one would be paying the costs of publication.

In the UK, it is the tax-payer who pays the costs of publication (which is "part of the cost of funding research"), by paying the cost of journal access via institutional subscriptions. It is fine to wish that to be otherwise, but it cannot just be wished away, and Wellcome has never had to worry about paying for it.

The Wellcome slogan and solution -- the "cost of publication is part of the cost of funding research," so pay pre-emptively for Gold OA -- works well enough for Wellcome, and as a wish list. But it is not a formula for getting us all from here (c. 30% OA, mostly Green) to there (100% OA). It does not scale up from Wellcome to the UK, let alone to the rest of the world.

What scales up is mandating Green OA. Once Green OA reaches 100% globally, journals can be cancelled, forcing them to downsize and convert to Fair Gold, single-paid at an affordable, sustainable price, instead of double-paid pre-emptively at today's arbitrarily inflated Fools-Gold price.

Hence it is exceedingly bad advice on Wellcome's part, to urge the UK, that because the "cost of publication is part of the cost of funding research," the UK should double-pay (subscriptions + Gold OA) for what Wellcome itself only needs to single-pay. (And this is without even getting into the sticky question of overpricing and double-dipping.)

Wellcome took a bold and pioneering step in 2004 in mandating OA.

But in since cleaving unreflectively and unresponsively to pre-emptive payment for Gold OA as the preferred means of providing OA -- because Wellcome does not have to pay for subscriptions -- the net effect of the Wellcome pioneering intiative is now beginning to turn negative rather than positive.

I hope the BIS Report will encourage Wellcome to re-think the rigid route that it has been promoting for a decade, culminating in the Finch Fiasco.

Business, Innovation and Skills Committee Select Committee
Announcement No.21
Monday 9 September 2013

NEW REPORT: Open Access: achieving a functional market
Under strict embargo until 00.01 BST on Tuesday 10 September

Government mistaken in focusing on Gold as route to full open access, says Committee

The Government’s commitment to increasing access to published research findings, and its desire to achieve full open access, are welcome, says the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee in a Report published today. However, whilst Gold open access is a desirable ultimate goal, focusing on it during the transition to a fully open access world is a mistake, says the Report.

The Report calls on the Government and RCUK to reconsider their preference for Gold open access during the five year transition period, and give due regard to the evidence of the vital role that Green open access and repositories have to play as the UK moves towards full open access.

The Report recommends that:

• the Government should take an active role in promoting standardisation and compliance across subject and institutional repositories [paragraph 25].

• RCUK should reinstate and strengthen the immediate deposit mandate in its original policy and improve the monitoring and enforcement of mandated deposit [paragraph 31].

• the Government and RCUK should revise their policies to place an upper limit of 6 month embargoes on STEM subject research and up to 12 month embargoes for HASS subject research [paragraph 50].

• the Government should mitigate against the impact on universities of paying Article Processing Charges out of their own reserves [paragraph 64].

• if the preference for Gold is maintained, the Government and RCUK should amend their policies so that APCs are only paid to publishers of pure Gold rather than hybrid journals to eliminate the risk of double-dipping [paragraph 77].

In his interview with Richard Poynder, Cameron Neylon, as always, makes many valid and astute points. But there is one thing about which I think he is quite profoundly mistaken:

CN: "While we can generate wider access with relatively little transitional costs through repository-mediated OA this won’t help to bring down subscriptions costs."

Apart from the fact that lowering subscription (or publication) costs and providing open access to publisher research are not the same thing at all (and that the urgent and overwhelming priority of Open Access is Access), I think Cameron underestimates the profound causal connection between them:

No, the primary purpose of repository-mediated OA (Green OA) is not to serve as a transition to Gold OA publishing: it is to provide OA.

But in providing the infrastructure for providing OA, the global network of Green OA repositories also provides the means of downsizing publishing to just the cost of managing peer review (which peers provide for free). All the rest of the costs of pre-Green-OA publishing (access-provision, archiving) are -- post-Green -- offloaded and distributed across the global network of Green OA repositories (while the print and online editions and their costs can be jettisoned completely).

That is why the small residual cost of post-Green Gold OA will be affordable, sustainable "Fair Gold" OA whereas the current cost of pre-Green Gold OA is arbitrarily inflated "Fools Gold" OA. And that's not just because the global Green OA infrastructure is not yet in place and absorbing all the costs of access-provision and archiving, but because subscriptions are still in place and have to keep being paid until those articles are made Green OA!

Hence pre-Green Gold means not only inflated prices but double-payment (for (1) subscriptions to all the must-have journals that are non-OA plus (2) Fools-Gold fees for pre-Green Gold OA journals) -- not to mention the further possibility of (3) publisher double-dipping in the case of hybrid Fools Gold.

So it is not at all the case that there is "a role for Green OA and institutional repositories, although perhaps only a transitional one": Green OA repositories can and will provide not only 100% OA, permanently, but they will thereby also make it possible (indeed necessary) for journal publishing to downsize and convert to Fair Gold -- and at the same time release the institutonal subscription funds, of which a fraction can then be used to pay (rather than double-pay) for Fair Gold.

Cameron is completely right, however, that "[t]he single most important task today is putting in place robust and transparent mechanisms to report on [Green OA mandatory] policy compliance… and monitor the growth of access." That done, effectively, the transition to Fair Gold OA will then take care of itself.

(I would close by emphasizing that just as providing OA itself is incomparably more important and urgent than publishing reform, so OA's provision of access to all users, rather than just to subscribers, is incomparably more important and urgent than providing further re-use rights, over and above online access free for all: Fair Gold and all the re-use rights that users need and authors want to provide will come, as surely as day follows night -- but Green OA must come first.)

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

1.0 Tripping Point: Delayed Access is not Open Access;
"Chorus" is a Trojan Horse
Note: David Wojick works part time as the Senior Consultant for Innovation at OSTI, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, in the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy. He has a PhD in logic and philosophy of science, an MA in mathematical logic, and a BS in civil engineering. In the exchanges below, he sounds [to me] very much like a publishing interest lobbyist, but judge for yourself. He also turns out to have a rather curious [and to me surprising] history in environmental matters…

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1.1 On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 3:56 PM, David Wojick wrote:

WOJICK: "The US Government is developing a green OA system for all articles based even in part on Federal funding, with a default embargo period of 12 months. The publishers have responded with a proposal called CHORUS that meets that requirement by taking users to the publisher's website. Many of the journals involved presently have no OA aspect so this will significantly increase the percentage of OA articles when it is implemented over the next few years."

Let us fervently hope that the US Government/OSTP will not be taken in by this publisher Trojan Horse called "CHORUS."  It is a tripping point, not a tipping point.

If not, we can all tip our hats goodbye to Open Access -- which means free online access immediately upon publication, not access after a one-year embargo.

CHORUS is just the latest successor organisation for self-serving anti-Open Access (OA) lobbying by the publishing industry. Previous incarnations have been the "PRISM coalition" and the "Research Works Act."

1. It is by now evident to everyone that OA is inevitable, because it is optimal for research, researchers, research institutions, the vast R&D industry, students, teachers, journalists and the tax-paying public that funds the research.

2. Research is funded by the public and conducted by researchers and their institutions for the sake of research progress, productivity and applications -- not in order to guarantee publishers' current revenue streams and modus operandi: Research publishing is a service industry and must adapt to the revolutionary new potential that the online era has opened up for research, not vice versa!

3. That is why both research funders (like NIH) and research institutions (like Harvard) -- in the US as well as in the rest of the world -- are increasingly mandating (requiring) OA: See ROARMAP.

4. Publishers are already trying to delay the potential benefits of OA to research progress by imposing embargoes of 6-12 months or more on research access that can and should be immediate in the online era.

5. The strategy of CHORUS is to try to take the power to provide OA out of the hands of researchers so that publishers gain control over both the timetable and the insfrastructure for providing OA.

6. And, without any sense of the irony, the publisher lobby (which already consumes so much of the scarce funds available for research) is attempting to do this under the pretext of saving "precious research funds" for research!

7. It is for researchers to provide OA, and for their funders and institutions to mandate and monitor OA provision by requiring deposit in their institutional repositories -- which already exist, for multiple purposes.

8. Depositing in repositories entails no extra research expense for research, just a few extra keystrokes, from researchers.

9. Institutional and subject repositories keep both the timetable and the insfrastructure for providing OA where it belongs: in the hands of the research community, in whose interests it is to provide OA.

10. The publishing industry's previous ploys -- PRISM and the Research Works Act -- were obviously self-serving Trojan Horses, promoting the publishing industry's interests disguised as the interests of research.
Let the the US Government not be taken in this time either.

[And why does the US Government not hire consultants who represent the interests of the research community rather than those of the publishing industry?]

Eisen, M. (2013) A CHORUS of boos: publishers offer their “solution” to public access

Giles, J. (2007) PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access. Nature 5 January 2007.

Harnad, S. (2012) Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again. Open Access Archivangelism 287 January 7. 2012

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1.2 On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 9:46 PM, David Wojick wrote:

WOJICK: "NIH uses a 12 month embargo and that is what the other Federal agencies are required to do, unless they can justify a longer or shorter period for certain disciplines. This has nothing to do with the publishers or CHORUS. The publishers are building CHORUS so that the agencies will use the publisher's websites and articles instead of a redundant repository like NIH uses. They are merely agreeing to the US Governments requirements, while trying to keep their users, so there is no Trojan horse here, just common sense. Immediate access is not an option in this Federal OA program. The OA community should be happy to get green OA."

1. The embargo length that the funding agencies allow is another matter, not the one I was discussing. (But of course the pressure for the embargoes comes from the publishers, not from the funding agencies.)

2. The Trojan Horse would be funding agencies foolishly accepting publishers' "CHORUS" invitation to outsource author self-archiving -- and hence compliance with the funder mandate -- to publishers, instead of having fundees do it themselves, in their own institutional repositories.

3. To repeat: Delayed Access is not Open Access -- any more than Paid Access is Open Access. Open Access is immediate, permanent online access, toll-free, for all.

4. Delayed (embargoed) Access is publishers' attempt to hold research access hostage to their current revenue streams, forcibly co-bundled with obsolete products and services, and their costs, for as long as possible. All the research community needs from publishers in the OA era is peer review. Researchers can and will do access-provision and archiving for themselves, in their own institutional OA repositories, at next to no cost. And peer review alone costs only a fraction of what institutions are paying publishers now for subscriptions.

5. Green OA is author-provided OA; Gold OA is publisher-provided OA. But OA means immediate access, so Delayed Access is neither Green OA nor Gold OA. (Speaking loosely, one can call author-self-archiving after a publisher embargo "Delayed Green" and publisher-provided free access on their website after an embargo "Delayed Gold," but it's not really OA at all if it's not immediate. And that's why it's so important to upgrade all funder mandates to make them immediate-deposit mandates, even if they are not immediate-OA mandates.)

WOJICK: "if delayed access is not open access in your view then why did you post the tipping point study, since it includes delayed access of up to 5 years? Most people consider delayed (green) access to be a paradigm of open access. That is how the term is used. You are apparently making your own language."

That is the way publishers would like to see the term OA used, paradigmatically. But that's not what it means. And I was actually (mildly) criticizing the study in question for failing to distinguish Open Access from Delayed Access, and for declaring that Open Access had reached the "Tipping Point" when it certainly has not -- specifically because of publisher embargoes. [Please re-read my summary, above: I don't think there is any ambiguity at all about what I said and meant.]

But OA advocates can live with the allowable funder mandate embargoes for the time being -- as long as deposit is mandated to be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, by the author, in the author's institutional repository, and not a year later, by the publisher, on the publisher's own website. Access to the author's deposit can be set as Closed Access during the allowable embargo period, but meanwhile authors can provide Almost-OA via their repository's facilitated Eprint Request Button.

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

Public Access to Federally Funded Research (Response to US OSTP RFI)
 
Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate

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1.3 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 7:57 AM, David Wojick  wrote:

WOJICK: "I think what the US Government is actually doing is far more important as an OA tipping point."

We are clearly not understanding one another:

Yes, the US funder mandates are extremely important, even if  they still need a tweak (as noted).

Yes, OA has not yet reached a tipping point. (That was my point.)

But no, Delayed Access is definitely not OA, let alone Green OA, although that is how publishers would dearly love to define OA, and especially Green OA.

WOJICK: "As for your Trojan horse point (#2) there is no author archiving with CHORUS."

Yes, that's the point: CHORUS is trying to take author self-archiving out of the hands and off the sites of the researchers and their institutions, to put it in the hands and on the site of publishers. That is abundantly clear.

And my point was about how bad that was, and why: a Trojan Horse for the research community and for the future of OA.

But the verb should be CHORUS "would be," not CHORUS "is" -- because, thankfully, it is not yet true that this 4th publishers' Trojan Horse has been allowed in at all. 

(The 1st Trojan Horse was Prism: routed at the gates. The 2nd was the "Research Works Act; likewise routed at the gates. The 3rd was the Finch Report: It slipped in, but concerted resistance from OA Advocates and the research community has been steadily disarming it. The 4th publisher Trojan Horse is CHORUS, and, as noted, OA Advocates and the research community are working hard to keep it out!)

WOJICK: "The author merely specifies the funder from a menu during the journal submission process and the publisher does the rest. Thus there is no burden on the authors and no redundant repository. The article is openly available from the publisher after the Federally specified embargo period. This is extremely efficient compared to the old NIH repository model."

Indeed it would be, and would put publishers back in full control of the future of OA.

Fortunately, the CHORUS deal is far from a fait accompli, and the hope (of OA advocates and the concerned research community) is that it never will be.

The only thing the "old NH repository model" (PubMed Central, PMC) needs is an upgrade to immediate institutional deposit, followed by automatic harvesting and import (after the allowable embargo has elapsed) by PMC or any other institution-external subject-based harvester. With that, the OSTP mandate model would be optimal (for the time being).

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1.4 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 12:13 PM, David Wojick wrote:

WOJICK: "This is not about author self archiving, which is a separate issue, so I see no Trojan horse."

1. The "This" is US federal funding agency Open Access mandates.

2. The "self" is the author, who is also the fundee, the one who is bound to comply with the conditions of the funder mandate.

3. The "archiving" is making the fundee's paper accessible free for all on the Web

4. The "Trojan Horse" is the attempt by publishers to take this out of the hands of the author/fundee/mandatee and put it into the hands of the publisher, who is not the fundee, not bound by the mandate, and indeed has a conflict of interest with making papers free for all on the Web.

5. On no account should the compliance with the funder mandate be outsourced and entrusted to a 3rd party that is not only not bound by the mandate, but in a conflict of interest with it.

WOJICK: "It is about the design of the Federal program, where I see no reason for redundant Federal archiving."

The web is full of "redundant archiving": the same document may be stored and hosted on multiple sites. That's good for back-up and reliability and preservation, and part of the way the Web works. And it costs next to nothing -- and certainly not to publishers. (If publishers wish to save federal research money, let them charge less for journal subscriptions; don't fret about "redundant archiving.")

PubMed Central (PMC) is a very valuable and widely used central search tool. Its usefulness is based on both its scope of coverage (thanks to mandates) and on its metadata quality. It borders on absurdity for publishers to criticize this highly useful and widely used resource as "redundant." It provides access where publishers do not.

Nor does PMC's usefulness reside in the fact that it hosts the full-texts of the papers it indexes. It's the metadata and search capacity that makes PMC so useful. It would be equally useful if the URL for each full-text to which PMC pointed were in each fundee's own institutional repository, and PMC hosted only the metadata and search tools. (Indeed, it would increase PMC's coverage and make it even more economical; many of us are hoping PMC and other central repositories like Arxiv will evolve in that direction.)

WOJICK: "There is nothing in the CHORUS approach to the Federal program design that precludes author self archiving in institutional repositories as a separate activity."

If authors self-archived of their own accord, "as a separate activity," there would have been no need for federal Open Access mandates.

The federal mandates do not require fundees to provide toll-free access only after a year after publication: They require them to provide toll-free access within a year at the latest. Publishers have every incentive to make (and keep) this the latest, by taking self-archiving out of authors' hands and doing it instead of them, as late as possible.

Moreover, funder OA mandates are increasingly being complemented by institutional OA mandates, which cover both funded and unfunded research. This is also why institutions have institutional repositories (archives), in which their researchers can deposit, and from which central repositories can harvest. This is also the way to tide over research needs during OA embargoes, with the help of institutional repositories' immediate Almost-OA Button.

And again, no need here for advice from publishers, with their conflicts of interest, on how institutions can save money on their "redundant archives" by letting publishers provide the OA in place of their researchers (safely out of the reach of institutional repositories' immediate Almost-OA Button).

WOJICK: "The journals are part of the research community and they have always been the principal archive."

Journals consist of authors, referees, editors and publishers. Publishers are not part of the research community (not even university or learned-society publishers); they earn their revenues from it.

Until the online era, the "principal archive" has been the university library. In the online era it's the web. The publisher's sector of the web is proprietary and toll-based. The research community's sector is Open Access.

And that's another reason CHORUS is a Trojan Horse.

WOJICK: "With CHORUS they will be again."

What on earth does this mean? That articles in the publishers' proprietary sector will be opened up after a year?

That sounds like an excellent way to ensure that they won't ever be opened up any earlier, and that mandates will be powerless to make them open up any earlier.

WOJICK: "After all the entire process is based on the article being published in the journal."

Yes, but what is at issue now is not publishing but access: when, where and how?

WOJICK: "It is true that this is all future tense including the Federal program, but the design principles are here and now."

And what is at issue here is the need to alert the Federal program that it should on no account be taken in by CHORUS's offer to "let us do the self-archiving for you."

WOJICK: "I repeat, immediate access is not a design alternative. The OSTP guidance is clear about that. So most of your points are simply irrelevant to the present situation."

The federal mandates do not require fundees to provide toll-free access only 12 months after publication: They require them to provide toll-free access 12 months at the latest. 

Immediate OA (as well as immediate-deposit plus immediate Almost-OA via the Button) is definitely an alternative -- as well as a design alternative.

But not if OSTP heeds the siren call of CHORUS.

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1.5 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 3:01 PM, David Wojick wrote:

WOJICK: "There is no funder mandate on authors at this point, so you are assuming a burdensome model that need not be implemented."

Right now, there is a presidential (OSTP) directive to US federal funding agencies to mandate (Green) OA.

It is each funding agency that will accordingly design and implement its own Green OA mandate, as the NIH did several years ago.

WOJICK: "The mandate (requirement) will, as always, be on the fundees: the authors of the articles that are to be made OA, as a condition of funding."

The only mandate is on the Federal funding agencies to provide public access to funder-related articles within 12 months of publication.

The presidential (OSTP) directive is to the US federal funding agencies to mandate (Green) OA, meaning that all published articles resulting from the research funded by each agency must be made OA -- within 12 months of publication at the latest.

The articles are by fundees. The ones bound by the mandates are the fundees. Fundees are the ones who must make their research OA, as a condition of funding.

WOJICK: "CHORUS does this in a highly efficient manner, rendering an author mandate unnecessary."

CHORUS does nothing. It is simply a proposal by publishers to funding agencies. 

And to suggest that the the reason funding agencies should welcome the CHORUS proposal is efficiency is patent nonsense.

To comply with their funder's requirements, fundees must specify which articles result from the funding. The few fundee keystrokes for specifying that are exactly the same few fundee keystrokes for self-archiving the article in the OA repository.

No gain in efficiency for funders or fundees in allowing publishers to host and time the OA: just a ruse to allow publishers to retain control over the time and place of providing OA.

Because of the monumental conflict of interest -- between publishers trying to protect their current revenue streams and the research community trying to make its findings accessible as soon and as widely as possible -- control over the time and place of providing OA should on no account be surrendered by funders and fundees to publishers.

WOJICK: "Search is no problem as there are already many ways to search the journals."

And there are also already many ways to search OA articles on the web or in repositories.

So, correct: Search is no problem, and not an issue. In fact, it's a red herring.

What is really at issue is: in whose hands should control over the time and place of providing OA be?

Answer: Findees, their institutions and their funders; not publishers.

WOJICK: "DOE PAGES, described in the first article I listed in my original post, is a model of an agency portal that is being designed to use CHORUS. It will provide agency-based search as well. CHORUS as well will provide bibliographic search capability."

To repeat: The same functionality (and potentially much more and better functionality) is available outside the control of publishers too, via the web, institutional repositories, harvesters, indexers and search engines.

The only thing still missing is the OA content. And that's what publishers are trying to hold back as long as possible, and to keep in their own hands.

WOJICK: "We simply do not need a new bunch of expensive redundant repositories like PMC."

And the research community simply does not need to cede control over the locus and timetable of providing OA to publishers. 

WOJICK: "I am also beginning to wonder about your Trojan horse metaphor. The Trojan horse is a form of deception, but there is no deception here, just a logical response to a Federal requirement, one that keeps a journal's users using the journal. The publishers are highly motivated to make CHORUS work."

CHORUS is all deception (and perhaps self-deception too, if publishers actually believe the nonsense about "efficiency" and "expense"), and the "logic" is that of serving publishers' interests, not the interests of research and researchers.

The simple truth is that the research community (researchers and their institutions) are perfectly capable of providing Green OA for themselves, cheaply and efficiently, in their own institutional OA repositories and central harvesters -- and that this is the best way for them to retain control over the time and place of providing OA, thereby ensuring that 100% immediate OA is reached worldwide as soon as possible.

Letting in the publishers' latest Trojan Horse, CHORUS, under the guise of increasing efficiency and reducing expense, would in reality be letting publishers maximize Delayed Access and fend off universal Green OA in favor of over-priced, double-paid (and, if hybrid, double-dipped) Fools Gold OA, thereby locking in publishers' current inflated revenue streams and inefficient modus operandi for a long time to come, and embargoing OA itself, instead of making publishing -- a service industry -- evolve and  adapt naturally to what is optimal for research in the online era.

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2.0 Research Community Interests
and the
Publishing Lobby's Latest Trojan Horse (CHORUS)

2.1 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 2:49 PM, David Wojick wrote:
 
WOJICK: "The Federal OA program is controlled by the Federal Government, so all your talk of ceding control is just a rhetorical device. Neither the fundees, the institutions nor the journals control it, except to the extent that the journals make the publication decisions. So no one is ceding control to anyone. And I repeat that the journals are part of the community, a central part. (You are doing your private language thing again. You do it a lot.)

"Under CHORUS the lead author merely has to check a box indicating the funder. The institutions have to do nothing more, nor does the fundee. The journal then gives the article link to the agency and makes the article publicly available at the agency controlled time. This is enormously simpler than creating repositories that fundees have to populate and funders have to work with (and someone has to build and maintain). In essence the article is published and the agency links to it. That is all and it cannot be any simpler than this. Creating a parallel universe of redundant repositories must be more complex, costly and burdensome."

As far as I know, the publishers' CHORUS deal that you describe (and that I have referred to in my not-so-private language argument as a Trojan Horse) has not yet been accepted by the Federal Government, nor by its funding agencies.

Maybe they will accept it, maybe they won't. I and many others have been describing the many reasons they should not accept it.

You are repeating arguments about the redundancy and complexity and costliness of repositories to which I and many others have already replied. 

But I am not trying to persuade you that researchers using their keystrokes to deposit in OA repositories is better for research and for OA than letting publishers do it for them: The ones I and many others are trying to persuade of that are the same ones that you and the rest of the publisher lobby are trying to persuade of the opposite: the Federal government and its research funding agencies.

May the best outcome (for the research community) win.

I want to close by reminding inquiring readers of just one of the many points that David Wojick and the other CHORUS lobbyists keep passing over in silence:

The Government directive is not to make funded research freely accessible 12 months after publication but within 12 months of publication. 

The publishers' Trojan Horse would not only take mandate compliance out of the hands of fundees, making compliance depend on publishers rather than fundees, but it would also ensure that the research would not be made freely accessible one minute before the full 12 months had elapsed.

If I were a publisher, interested only in protecting my current income streams, come what may, I'd certainly lobby for that, just as I would lobby for untrammelled cigarette ads and zones, if I were a tobacco company, interested only in protecting my current income streams, come what may; or for the untrammelled manufacture and use of plastic bags, if I were a plastic bag company with similar "community" interests.

CHORUS is a terrific way of locking in publisher embargoes and Delayed Access for years and years to come, thereby leaving payment for Fools Gold as the sole option for providing immediate OA. 

(Shades of Finch -- and RWA, and PRISM... The publishing lobby is a "part" of the research "community" indeed, heroically defending "our" joint interests! I'm ready for the usual next piece of rhetoric, about how un-embargoed Green OA would destroy journal publishing, and with it peer review and research quality and reliability... We've heard it all, many times over, for close to 25 years now...)

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2.2 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 8:06 AM, David Wojick wrote:
 
WOJICK: "What Federal system design arguments have I not responded to?"

Here are the first few arguments you have not responded to. (I have no idea what you are attempting to sector off under the guise of responding only to "Federal system design" arguments):

1. that mandates are for public access within up to a year whereas CHORUS would provide it only at the very end

2. that OA mandates are intended to require authors to provide OA whereas CHORUS would take it out of authors' hands entirely (thereby mooting mandate compliance altogether, let alone earlier compliance or wider compliance, for unfunded and un-mandated research).

3. that repository deposit facilitates providing eprints during any OA embargo with the repository's eprint-request Button whereas CHORUS prevents it

4. that CHORUS locks in 1-year embargoes and puts and leaves publishers in control of both the hosting and the timetable for public access

5. that repository costs are small and mostly already invested, and for multiple uses, hence CHORUS would not save money but rather waste repositories

I have more, but that should be fine for a start...

WOJICK: "It is not an ad hominem to point out that the Federal policy is not anti-publisher, as many OA advocates are."

I for one am not anti-publisher.  But I'm  very definitely against publisher anti-OA-mandate lobbying and I'm also against publisher embargoes on Green OA. 

Apart from that, I have a long history of defending publishers against overzealous OA advocates or overpricing plainants -- as long as the publisher was on the "side of the angels," by endorsing immediate, unembargoed Green, as Springer and Elsevier did for many years.

The gloves came off when publishers started trying to renege on their prior endorsements of immediate Green.

WOJICK: "It is an important fact about the policy. I have to be repetitive because Harnad is presenting the same non-design arguments over and over."

I have no idea what you mean by "non-design" arguments. The points above are against CHORUS as a means of implementing the funding agencies' Green OA mandate, that's all.

WOJICK: "Arguments such as that publishers cannot be trusted..."

I have not said that. I said that compliance with funders' mandates on fundees to provide OA to their funded research should on no account be entrusted to publishers because of the obvious conflict of interest: The interest of research and researchers is that research should be OA immediately; the interest of publishers is that access should be delayed for as long as possible (12 months, within the "design" of the OSTP directive).

I fully trust that publishers would faithfully make articles publicly accessible -- on the very last day of the maximal allowable OA embargo

WOJICK: "[Arguments such as that] access should be immediate via institutional repositories…"

I don't just repeat that over and over: I give the reasons why: Because Open Access means Open Access, and the reasons that make Open Access important at all make it important immediately upon publication, not 12 months later.

And it's institutional repositories because institutions are the providers of all research, funded and unfunded, in every discipline. Institutions have already created OA repositories. They have many reasons for wanting to archive, manage and publicly showcase their own research output in their own repositories -- over and above the reasons for OA itself (which are: maximizing research uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress). 

And institutions themselves are also beginning to mandate Green OA. Hence funder and institutional mandates should be convergent and mutually reinforcing, not divergent and in conflict. All institutional research output should be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Its metadata and URLs can then be harvested by whatever central access points, databases, indices and search engines disciplines wish to create.) 

And if the author wishes to comply with a publisher embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access instead of Open Access during the embargo, in which case the repository's eprint-request Button can provide Almost-OA during the embargo (while embargoes last -- which will not be long, one hopes, once mandatory Green OA has become universal).

All of these benefits are lost if publishers are in control of providing public access on their sites, a year after publication.

WOJICK: "[Arguments such as that] delayed access is not open access, etc. My response does not vary."

Delayed access means losing a year of Open Access. Your response does not vary because the publisher lobby is interested in minimizing, not maximizing Open Access. If the maximal allowable delay is 12 months, publishers will happily make sure it is not a minute less than 12 months, and on their site, with no Almost-OA Button to tide over the embargo, no integration with institutional mandates, and authors entirely out of the compliance loop for mandates that are intended to generate as much OA as possible, as soon as possible.

My own response varies as much as possible, in an effort -- with each new iteration -- to present from every angle the case for implementing OA mandates in such a way as to provide the maximum benefit to research and researchers, rather than just to protect the proprietary interests of publishers at the expense of research, researchers, and the public that funds them.

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2.3 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:47 AM, David Wojick wrote:

WOJICK: "I have already responded to these points. The publisher's self interested motivation is to keep the web traffic to its journals."

At the expense (to research and researchers) of impeding the growth of OA and OA mandates and ensuring that the allowable embargo length is always the maximum 12 months. ("If you want immediate-OA, please pay the Fools-Gold OA fee!|)

WOJICK: "Studies suggest [publishers] are losing 20% to PMC."

And while publishers' download sites have lost the traffic, research has gained a great deal of functionality, as well as OA. Those who consider it in terms of the interests of the research community see this outcome as perfectly natural and welcome, given the power and potential of the online era.

WOJICK: "The publishers believe this, whether it is true or not, thus their motivation."

Their motivation is in no doubt. But the issue is not what is best for publishers but what is best for research, researchers and the public that funds them.

WOJICK: "The mandate is that the articles be made publicly accessible and the articles are the publisher's so they are not third party contractors, whatever that might mean."

My articles are my publisher's, not mine?

I think you might mean that the publishers are the holders of the copyright, or exclusive vending rights.

Well we're talking about a mandate here -- by the party of the second part, the author's funder, requiring the party of the first part, the author, to make the research they've funded publicly accessible within a year of publication at the very latest.
 
That's a condition of a contract the author must sign before ever doing the research, let alone signing any subsequent contract with any party of the third part regarding vending rights.

WOJICK: "The fundees need play no role."

The fundees play no role? No role in what? The funder mandates bind the fundees, not some other party.

WOJICK: "The publishers are making a ground breaking concession by agreeing to the Federal embargo deadlines."

Agreeing? It seems to me they don't have much choice! Who are publishers conceding to? And conceding what?

If this is publisher largesse rather than federal government duress I would really like to know to what we owe publishers' newfound magnanimity...

WOJICK: "This is great news for OA. I have no idea what you mean by letting them sit. They will be on view in their on-line journals, which is arguably where they belong."

I think Cristóbal Palmer's "let[ting] them sit" may have been an ill-chosen descriptor, but I can still make sense of it:

Ceding the provision of public access to the publisher's site and the publisher's timetable means that research articles must sit for 12 months, accessible only to subscribers, even though the mandate states that they must be made publicly accessible within 12 months at the latest. Fundees could have deposited them in repositories immediately, and made them publicly accessible earlier, or, if they wished to comply with a publishers embargo, made them immediately Almost-OA, via the repository's Button, instead of sitting inaccessibly for 12 months.

And before you reply "fundees can still do that if they want to," let me remind you of the fundamental purpose of Green OA mandates: It's to get authors to provide OA. Un-mandated, they don't. Not because they don't want to. But because without a mandate from their funders or institutions, they dare not: because of fear of their publishers. The mandate releases authors from that fear.

And the CHORUS variant -- in which "the fundee has no role" -- would leave authors stuck in that fear, contractually unprotected by a funder mandate, and that would render the funder policy empty and ineffectual beyond its absolutely minimum requirement, which is public access after 12 months (but not a moment before).

And that would of course suit publishers just fine. In fact, maybe that's the reason for their newfound magnanimity: "Concede" on public access after a 12-month embargo, take control of hosting and providing access, and maybe that pesky global clamor for immediate OA will go away -- or, better, maybe it will just redirect authors toward the Fools-Gold counter where they can pay hybrid publishers for immediate OA.

WOJICK: "The repository approach made sense when the publishers refused to provide access. That day has passed."

Don't bank on it. The clamor for access is growing and growing. And that's immediate Open Access, not publisher-Delayed Access after 12 months.

Stevan Harnad