Open Access Archivangelism

Richard Poynder has elicited a splendid summary of OA by the person who has done more to bring about OA than anyone else on the planet: Peter Suber

Here are a few supplements that I know Peter will agree with:

1. Potential CHORUS Catastrophe for OA: Peter's summary of OA setbacks mentions only Finch. Finch was indeed a fiasco, with the publishing lobby convincing the UK to mandate, pay for, and prefer Gold OA (including hybrid Gold OA), and to downgrade and ignore Green OA.

Peter notes the damage that the publisher lobby has successully inflicted on worldwide (but especially UK) OA progress with the Finch/RCUK policy, but I'm sure he will agree that if the Trojan Horse of CHORUS were to be accepted by the US federal government and its funding agencies, the damage would be even greater and longer lasting:

CHORUS is an attempt by the publishing lobby to take compliance with Green OA mandates out of the hands of the fundees whom OA mandates are designed to require to provide OA, and instead transfer control over the execution, the locus and the timetable for mandate compliance into the hands of publishers.

Adopting CHORUS would mean that President Obama's OSTP directive -- requiring that federally funded research must be made freely accessible online within 12 months of publication -- would instead ensure that it was made freely accessible after 12 months, and not one minute earlier;.

And CHORUS would ensure also that the authors whom all Green OA mandates worldwide are designed to require to provide OA -- because they want OA yet dare not provide it without a mandate from their institutions or funders, for fear of their publishers -- would no longer be affected by any mandate:

With CHORUS, publishers would have succeeded in locking in 12-month-embargoed Delayed Access instead of immediate Green OA for years to come, in the US and, inevitably, also worldwide.

So, as I am sure Peter will agree, CHORUS must be rejected at all costs, just as the previous Trojan Horses of the publishing lobby -- PRISM and the Research Works Act -- were rejected. It's bad enough that Finch slipped through.

2. Hybrid Gold OA has a few additional negative features, apart from the ones Peter already mentions:

Even if the publiser gives subscribing institutions a rebate to offset double-dipping, Hybrid Gold locks in current total publisher revenue -- from institutional subscription fees plus author hybrid Gold OA fees -- come what may. Hybrid Gold immunizes publishers from any pressure to cut costs by phasing out obsolete products and services in the online era.

Only globally mandated Green OA self-archiving in repositories by authors can force publishers to downsize to the post-Green essentials alone.

And if a hybrid Gold journal also imposes an embargo on Green, that is tantamount to legally sanctioned extortion, even without double-dipping: "If you want to provide immediate OA, you must pay me even more than I am already being paid by your institution for subscriptions -- and your institution only gets back a tiny fraction of the rebate from your surcharge."

(This is also the option to which CHORUS, in tandem with Finch, would hold immediate OA hostage for many years more. Since immediate OA is optimal for research, hence inevitable, publishers, if funders take in their Trojan Horse, will have succeeded in delaying OA for as long as they possibly could, in defence of their current revenue streams. This is also the publishers' self-serving scenario in which COPE institutions would unwittingly collude, if they funded Gold OA without first mandating immediate-deposit Green OA.)

3. Pre-Green Fools Gold vs. Post-Green Fair Gold: The only thing that can bring the cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing down to a fair, affordable, sustainable price is globally mandated Green OA. Only Green OA will allow institutions to cancel their journal subscriptions, thereby forcing journals to adapt naturally to the online era by cutting obsolete costs, downsizing and converting to Fair Gold. Once Green OA mandates fill them, it is the global network of Green OA repositories that will allow publishers to phase out all the products and services associated with access-provision and archiving. CHORUS and Finch are designed to allow publishers to keep co-bundling (and charging) for their obsolete products and services as long as possible.

Stevan Harnad

Bravo to Danny Kingsley for her invaluable antipodean OA advocacy!

I think Danny is spot-on in all the points she makes, so these are just a few supplementary remarks:

1. The publishing industry is using Green OA embargoes and lobbying to try to hold OA hostage to its current inflated revenue streams as long as possible-- by forcing the research community to pay for over-priced, double-paid (and double-dipped, if hybrid) Fools Gold if it wants to have OA at all.

It's time for the research community to stop stating that it will stop mandating and providing Green OA if there's ever any evidence that it will cause subscription cancelations. Of course Green OA will cause cancelations, eventually; and so it should.

Green OA will not only provide 100% OA but it will also force publishers to phase out obsolete products and services and their costs, by offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide nework of Green OA repositories.

Once subscriptions are made unsustainable by mandatory Green OA, journals will downsize and convert to post-Green Fair-Gold, in place of today's over-priced, double-paid (and double-dipped, if hybrid) Fools-Gold.

Green OA embargoes have one purpose, and one purpose only: to delay this optimal, inevitable, natural and obvious outcome for as long as possible.

Research is not funded, conducted, peer-reviewed and made public in order to provide or guarantee revenues for the publishing industry, but to be used, applied and built upon, to the benefit of the public that funds it.

Globally mandated Green OA will not only provide OA, but it will also force publishers to cut obsolete costs and downsize to just managing peer review. All access-provision and archiving will be done by the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories.

It's in order to delay that outcome that publishers are using every means at their disposal -- embargoing Green OA and lobbying against Green OA mandates with PRISM, the Research Works Act, the Finch Report and CHORUS -- to fend off Green OA as long as possible and force the research community instead toward over-priced, double-paid (and, if hybrid, double-dipped) Fools Gold if they want to have any form of OA at all.

2. There is a powerful tactical triad -- tried, tested and proven effective -- to moot publisher delay tactics (embargoes and lobbying) -- and that triad is for both funders and insitutions to

(i) mandate immediate deposit in institutional repositories, whether or not the deposit is made immediately OA,

(ii) implement the institutional repository's facilitated eprint request Button to tide over research access needs during any embargo, and

(iii) designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publictions for institutional performance review (or national research assessment).

3. The research community should resolutely resist publishers' attempt to imply that "Green OA" means "Delayed (embargoed) OA." It does not. OA means immediate, unembargoed access. It is publishers who are trying to impose embargoes, in order to delay OA and preserve their current inflated revenue streams for as long as possible, forcing authors to pay for grotesquely overpriced Fools Gold if they want immediate OA.

The immediate-deposit mandate (with the Button) immunizes against those tactics. "Delaying OA" is publishers' objective, against the interests of research, researchers, their universities, their funders, the vast R&D industry, students, teachers, the developing world, journalists, and especially the general public who is funding the research. Immediate-deposits mandates are the way for the research community to ensure that the interests of research. Otherwise (I have said many times), it is the publishing tail continuing to wag the research dog.

4. OA Metrics will follow, not precede OA. The reason we do not have 100% OA yet is not because of bias against Gold OA journals. It is because of researcher passivity, publisher activism (embargoes and lobbying) and lack of clear information and understanding about OA and how to make it happen.

It is normal and natural that journals' quality and importance should be based on their prior track-record for quality and importance (rather than their cost-recovery model). New journals (whether OA or non-OA) first need to establish a track record for quality and importance. Besides the journal's track record and citation impact, however, we also have citation counts for individual authors and articles, and we are slowly also developing download counts and other metrics of research usage and impact. There will be many more OA metrics too -- but for that to happen, the articles themselves need to be made OA! And that is why mandating Green OA is the priority.

Stevan Harnad

The cynical, self-serving spin of Springer's replies to Richard Poynder is breathtaking: Is it a sign of Springer's new ownership?

Despite the double-talk, applying a 12-month embargo where the policy has been to endorse unembargoed immediate-Green for 10 years could hardly be described (or justified) as "simplifying" things for the author, or anyone. It would be a pure and simple bid to maintain and maximize revenue streams from both subscriptions and Gold OA. (Note that I say "would" because in fact Springer is still Green and hence still on the Side of the Angels: read on.)

Green OA means free, immediate, permanent online access; hence a 12-month embargo hardly makes Green OA sustainable, as Springer suggests! It's not OA at all.

As stated previously, the distinction between an author's institutional repository and an author's "personal website" (which is of course likewise institutional) is a distinction between different sectors of an institutional disk. The rest is a matter of tagging.

The purpose of research, and of tax-payer funding of research, and of the online medium itself, is certainly not to make the subscription model sustainable for publishers.

The only service from publishers that needs to be sustained is the management of peer review. Researchers already do all the rest for free (write the papers and peer-review the papers); if they can now also archive their peer-reviewed papers and provide online access to them for all users, what justification is there for saying that the subscription model needs to be sustained?

Paying for Gold OA today, at its current arbitrarily inflated price for a bundle of no longer necessary products and services (print, PDF, archiving, access-provision), is paying for Fools-Gold.

And paying for it while subscriptions continue to be sustainable -- hence while paying for them continues to be essential for institutions -- is double-payment: Subscription fees plus Fools-Gold OA fees.

If, in addition. the payment is to the very same hybrid-Gold publisher, then it's not just double-paid Fools-Gold: it also allows double-dipping by the publisher.

Nor is double-dipping corrected if (mirabile dictu) a publisher really does faithfully lower annual subscription fees by every penny of its total annual hybrid Gold revenues, because if an institution (as one subscriber out of, say, 2000 subscribing institutions) pays $XXX in Fools-Gold OA fees, over and above its subscription fees, then its own share of the subscription rebate is just 1/2000th of the $XXX that it has double-paid the hybrid Gold publisher. The rest of the rebate goes to the other 1999 beneficieries of that institution's hybrid-Gold Fools-Gold double-payment.

And this disparity for the hybrid double-payer would perist until (as Springer hopes), all institutions are paying today's Fools-Gold instead of subscriptions. That would be a perfect way for publishers to sustain today's revenue streams, come what may -- and that's exactly what Springer hopes to do, by holding Green OA hostage to embargoes, and thereby holding institutions hostage to subscriptions untill they are all coughing up the same amount for Fools Gold instead, its price determined by whatever sustains today's subscription revenues rather than what institutions and researchers actually need -- and what it actually costs.

This is why Green OA is anathema to publishers, even as they purport to be "all for OA." For Green OA is the only thing that would force publishers to downsize to the true essentials of peer-reviewed research publishing in the online era, instead of continuing to exact vastly inflated prices for mostly obsolete products and services, just in order to sustain their current revenue streams and their current M.O..

(Of course Springer changed its policy in part because of Finch/RCUK: Green OA and Green OA mandates were already anathema, but Green publishers back-pedalling on that alone would have looked very bad: all stick and no carrot. Finch/RCUK provided the perfect carrot: UK government funds to pay for Fools-Gold, including hybrid Fools-Gold -- with the UK government not only funding the Fools-Gold option, but explicitly preferring it over cost-free Green. An offer no publisher could refuse, and a perfect cover for taking it, under the pretext of complying with government mandates, simplifying things for authors, and facilitating OA -- in the form of lucrative Fools-Gold OA.)

But it's not that easy to keep holding the entire worldwide research community hostage to an obsolete technology and outrageous, unnecessary prices, simply by embargoing Green OA.

First, as noted, the distinction between an author's institutional repository and the author's institutional website won't wash: The difference is just in what we name them. Springer authors can go ahead and provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA based on Springer's current policy.

But even if Springer were then to go on to bite the bullet, embargo all OA self-archiving, and admit that it has stopped being a Green publisher (iin order to protect its current revenue streams come what may), authors could still deposit immediately; and if they wished to comply with Springer's embargo, they could set access to the immediate-deposit as Closed Access. The institutional repository's facilitated reprint request Button can then allow any would-be user to request -- and the author to provide -- an eprint with just one click each, almost-immediately.

This "Almost-OA" will not only serve research needs almost as well as OA itself during the embargo, but it will also have the same effect, almost as quickly, as immediate Green OA, in forcing publishers to cut costs, downsize, and convert to Fair-Gold, at an afforable, sustainable price, precisely because it make the subscription model unsustainable.

This is why it is so important that all institutional and funder mandates should be immediate-deposit mandates (regardless of whether the deposit is immediately-OA or embargoed).

Springer: "there is widespread, if not universal, acceptance that systematic and widespread author manuscript deposit (“green” open access) of subscription-based journal articles in repositories requires an embargo period in order to ensure the sustainability of the journals"

The sustainability at issue for Springer is not the sustainability of journals but the sustainability of the subscription model (or an equal-sized revenue stream for publishers).

And the only ones convinced that the subscription model or an equal-sized revenue stream needs to be sustained at all costs are publishers.

Springer: "Springer, which has been committed to open access in deeds, not just words, for almost 10 years, is focused on offering two models which we believe to be stable and sustainable: embargoed green open access, and immediate gold open access."

That's two models that are designed to sustain Springer's current revenue streams: charging for Fools Gold and embargoing cost-free Green, so that Green cannot provide immediate OA and force down the price of pre-Green Fools Gold to post-Green Fair Gold.

Springer: "We modified the [former Springer unembargoed Green] policy to make it simple and consistent for our authors, for funders and for our employees, as all forms of open access continue to grow."

Translation: We embargoed Green in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

Springer: "In order to ensure that green open access deposit remains sustainable on a large scale, we are standardizing the embargo period for all repository archiving to 12 months."

Translation: We embargoed Green in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

Springer: "this means that Springer authors can deposit into a funder repository after a 12-month embargo period even if the funder does not require the author to do so."

Whereas formerly Springer authors could deposit immediately upon publication.

Springer: "www.eprints.org describes institutional repositories, e.g. hosted by Eprint, as "a collection of digital documents [… which] share the same metadata, making their contents interoperable with one another." Author websites on the other hand serve various purposes and are not specifically created for document collection."

All websites have metadata. Interoperability allows the metadata to be harvested by service-providers. Interoperability is a matter of degree. All websites are harvestable (e.g., by google). What is Springer's point? That there is a threshold on degree of interoperability that distinguishes an "institutional website" from an "institutional repository"? There is no such threshold point. And if there were, it would be arbitrary and irrelevant to the justification of a Green OA embargo, which would, as always, rest purely on the publisher's attempt to hold OA hostage to its current revenue streams.

Springer: "We have eliminated from our policy the distinction between institutional repositories and others, such as subject and funder repositories, and created one simple rule that applies across the board -- authors may deposit in any repository they like, and regardless of whether they are required by a mandate or not, as long as the embargo period is observed."

Translation: Formerly we endorsed immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving, now we are embargoing it in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

Springer: "This supports green OA by making it sustainable, and therefore making it possible for Springer as a publisher to actively encourage and facilitate it. It also helps to clarify the respective benefits of the Green and Gold models, each of which is likely to have a place going forward."

Translation: We embargoed Green in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

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

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

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).

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2)

announces:

"Remaining a fair player, The Royal Society ensures that published open access articles bearing a publication fee are deducted from subscription prices through its Transparent Pricing Mechanism"

The Royal Society thereby pledges that it will not "double-dip" for hybrid Gold OA. The RS continues to collect subscription fees from institutions worldwide, but whatever additional revenue if gets from individual authors for hybrid Gold OA, it pledges to return as a subscription rebate to all subscribing institutions.

But does this mean the RS is a "fair player" insofar as OA is concerned?

Hardly.

Yet this is not because the hybrid Gold OA rebate amounts to individual authors' full payments for Gold OA subsidizing the subscription costs of institutions worldwide. (The author's own institution only gets back a tiny fraction of its authors' Gold OA fee in its tiny portion of the worldwide subscription rebate.)

No. Whether the RS is indeed a fair player depends on whether RS authors have the choice between providing Gold OA by paying the RS that additional cost -- over and above what the world's institutions are already paying the RS in subscriptions -- or providing Green OA at no additional cost, by self-archiving their own article free for all online.

For if the RS does not give its authors this choice, then it is certainly not a "fair player": It is holding RS authors who want to provide OA hostage to the payment of an additional hybrid Gold OA fee.

From 2005-2010, the RS had a chequered history with OA.

In 2010, however, the RS came down squarely on "the side of the angels", endorsing immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving of the author's final refereed draft.

But now -- perhaps -- the RS seems to have adopted a 12-month embargo on Green OA (under the fell influence -- perhaps -- of the new Finch/RCUK OA policy?):

"You are free to post…the “Author Generated Postprint” - Your personal copy of the revised version of the Article as accepted by Us… on Your personal or institutional web site and load it onto an institutional or not for profit repository no earlier than 12 months from the date of first publication of the Definitive Published Version."

Or is this just another (silly) attempt to distinguish between authors posting on their "institutional website" (unembargoed) versus posting in their "institutional repository" (embargoed) -- in which case RS authors can happily ignore this empty pseudo-distinction, knowing that their institutional repository is indeed their institutional website.

But the RS would do itself a historic favour if it dropped all this double-talk, unworthy of such a venerable institution, and lived up to its decree that:

"In keeping with its role as the UK's national academy of science, The Royal Society is committed to the widest possible dissemination of research outputs."

by not trying to hold Green OA self-archiving hostage to sustain the RS's subscription revenues at all costs.

There will be time for the RS to go Gold at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, single-paid instead of over-charged and double-paid, as now (with or without double-dipping) -- after Green has prevailed worldwide and made subscriptions no longer sustainable.

But that will be post-Green Fair-Gold. What the RS (and other publishers, less venerable) are trying to use OA embargoes for today is to force authors to pay pre-emptively for pre-Green Fools-Gold if they want to provide OA, so as to ensure that their revenue streams do not shrink either way (subscription or Gold).

But shrink they must, because in the imminent post-Green PostGutenberg era, the only service the RS or any other research journal publisher will need to perform is the management of peer review. The global network of Green OA institutional repositories will do all the rest (access-provision and archiving) at not extra cost to the publisher (hence no grounds for an extra charge to authors or users either).

Caveat Emptor. And peer review alone costs only a fraction of what -- whether subscription, Gold or hybrid) are being paid now (with or without double dipping).

Hence the RS "Membership Programme" is -- like all hybrid Fools-Gold -- a Trojan Horse. Caveat Emptor

Rebecca Marsh, Director of External Relations and Services, Emerald Group Publishing Limited & Tony Roche, Publishing Director of Emerald Group Publishing Limited have posted their defence of the Emerald policy changes reported by Richard Poynder: "Open Access: Emerald's Green Starts to Fade".

First, a paraphrase of what Marsh & Roche wrote:

(1) All Emerald authors may do immediate, unembargoed Open Access self-archiving if they wish, but (2) not if they must. If they must self-archive, they must wait 24 months or ask individually for permission.

The sensible Emerald author will self-archive immediately, and ignore clause (2) completely. It is empty, unverifiable, unenforceable, pseudo-legal FUD that has been added as a perverse effect of the folly of the UK Finch Committee recommendations.

The Emerald policy tweak is obviously to cash in on the money that the UK has decided to squander on pre-emptive "Fools Gold" OA, as well as to try to fend off universal Green OA as long as is humanly possible.

Below I reproduce the Emerald representatives' posting's text, cutting out the empty verbiage, to make the double-talk clearly visible and comprehensible.

Emerald:
"...Emerald has had a Green Open Access [OA] policy for over a decade. [All Emerald] authors who personally wish to self-archive the pre- or post-print version of their article on their own website or in a repository... can do this immediately upon official publication of their paper. This principle continues to underpin our Green OA policy and remains unchanged....

"...[Emerald] has provided an alternative route to OA for researchers who are mandated to make their papers Open Access immediately, or after a specified period. We also set the Article Processing Charge (APC) at a relatively low level to assist authors...

"Emerald has... requested that authors wait 24 months before depositing their post-prints if a mandate is in place. Where a mandate exists for deposit immediately on publication or with a shorter mandate but no APC fund is provided, we invite all authors to contact us..."

Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Gold OA pre-emptively today are premature.

Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA. Hence, for institutions, paying pre-emptively for Gold OA today means double-paying -- subscriptions for their incoming articles plus APCs for their outgoing articles-- and in the case of "hybrid Gold," when both sums are paid to the very same journal, it also means double-dipping by publishers.

Even apart from double-paying and double-dipping, the asking APC price per article for Gold OA today (whether "pure" or "hybrid") is still inflated; and there is concern that paying to publish may also inflate acceptance rates as well as lower quality standards to maximize revenue in the case of "pure Gold" OA.

What is needed now is for all universities and funders worldwide to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA").

That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA goes on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (phasing out the print edition and online edition, offloading access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay this residual service cost.

The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

This is the difference between today's pre-emptive pre-Green double-paid, double-dipped over-priced pre-Green "Fools Gold" and tomorrow's affordable, sustainable, post-Green Fair Gold.

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).

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2)

Jack Stilgoe ("Open Access Inaction," Guardian 18 June 2013) has the indignation but not the information:

1. UCL has a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate:

In May 2009, UCL Academic Board agreed two principles to underpin UCL’s publication activity and to support its scholarly mission:

-- That, copyright permissions allowing, a copy of all research outputs should be deposited in the UCL repository in Open Access

-- That individual UCL academic researchers should be directly responsible for providing and maintaining details of their publications in relevant UCL databases so as to support both Open Access and the requirement for UCL to keep an accurate record of its research outputs

UCL, therefore, has a ‘Green’ Open Access policy, by which copies of UCL research are deposited in UCL Discovery, UCL’s Open Access repository. This UCL policy informs UCL’s approach to the open access requirements of research funders.

2. Elsevier's self-archiving policy is "Green," meaning all Elsevier authors retain the right to make their final, refereed drafts OA immediately (without embargo) by self-archiving them in their institutional repository.

3. The Elsevier self-archiving policy contains double-talk to the effect that "authors may self-archive without embargo if they wish but not if they must":

"Accepted author manuscripts (AAM): Immediate posting and dissemination of AAM’s is allowed to personal websites, to institutional repositories, or to arXiv. However, if your institution has an open access policy or mandate that requires you to post, Elsevier requires an agreement to be in place which respects the journal-specific embargo periods."

The "agreement" in question is not with the author, but with the author's institution. Unless UCL has been foolish enough to sign such an agreement (in order to get a better deal on Elsevier subscription prices), authors can of course completely ignore this absurd clause.

4. Even if UCL has foolishly signed such an agreement with Elsevier, the refereed final draft can nevertheless be deposited immediately, with access set as Closed Access instead of Open Access during the embargo. During that period, the UCL repository's facilitated eprint request Button can provide Almost-OA almost-instantly with one click from the requester and then one click from the author.

5. Surely even double-clicking is preferable to double-paying Elsevier (subscription plus Gold OA fees), as RCUK/Finch foolishly prefers? Even if "robust knowledge is expensive to curate" (which is false) surely it needn't be that expensive...

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).

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Didier Pélaprat wrote on GOAL:

"Springer, which defined itself some months ago as a "green publisher" in an advertisement meeting to which they invited us (they call that "information" meeting) and did not ask any embargo for institutional open repositories (there was only an embargo for the repositories of funders with a mandate), now changed its policy (they call this a "new wording") with a 12-month embargo for all Open repositories.

This is now displayed in Sherpa/Romeo. It was stated that this new policy was settled "in reaction to the US, Europe and RCUK policy".

I figured out that this would make some "buzz", but for the moment I did not see any reaction. Did you hear of one?"

---

No buzz, because the change is inconsequential:

"Authors may self-archive the author’s accepted manuscript of their articles on their own websites. Authors may also deposit this version of the article in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later."

1. There is no difference between the authors' "own websites" and their own institution's "repository."

Authors' websites are sectors of their own institution's diskspace, and their institutional repository is a sector of their own institution's diskspace. Way back in 2003 U. Southampton had already laid this nonsensical pseudo-legal distinction to rest pre-emptively by formally declaring their authors' sector of their institutional repository their personal website:

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

2. As to institution-external OA repositories, many green publishers try to forbid them, but this too is futile nonsense: External repositories can simply link to the full-text in the institutional repository.

Indeed this has always been the main reason I have been strongly advocating for years that self-archiving mandates should always stipulate institutional deposit rather than institution-external deposit. (Springer or any publisher has delusions, however, if they think any of their pseudo-legal double-talk can get physicists who have been self-archiving directly in Arxiv for over two decades to change their ways!)

3. But, yes, Finch/RCUK's persistence in its foolish, thoughtless and heedless policy is indeed having its perverse consequences, exactly as predicted, in the form of more and more of this formalistic FUD from publishers regarding Green OA embargoes.

Fortunately, HEFCE/REF has taken heed. If their proposed immediate-(institutional)-deposit mandate is adopted, not only is all this publisher FUD mooted, but it increases the likelihood that other OA mandates. too, will be upgraded to HEFCE's date-stamped immediate-deposit as the mechanism for submitting articles to institutional research performance review or national research assessment.

4. If a publisher says you may self-archive without embargo if you do it voluntarily, but not if your funder requires you to do it: Do it, and, if ever asked, say, hand on heart, "I did it voluntarily."

This ploy, which Springer too seems to have borrowed from Elsevier, consisting of pseudo-legal double-talk implying that
"you may deposit immediately if you needn't, but not if you must" is pure FUD and can and should be completely ignored. (Any author foolish enough to be taken in by such double-talk deserves all the needless usage and impact losses they will get!)

If there's to be "buzz," let the facts and contingencies at least be got straight!

---

Off-line query from [identity removed]:

"This email expresses my current confusion about green open access and Springer. Forgive my concreteness, but I don’t “get it.” I now self-archive my publications on sites such as ResearchGate and academia.edu.

"I simply don’t understand the Springer mandate! Can you refer me to some text somewhere which expresses all of this in really plain English?"

Springer says you can self-archive your final, refereed draft on your own website (which includes your institutional repository) immediately, without embargo.

Springer also says that in institution-external repositories you can only deposit it after a 12-month embargo.

This means, technically and formally, that ResearchGate or academia.edu can link to the full text in the institutional repository, but they cannot host the full text itself till after the 12-month embargo.

(In principle, RG/AE could also link to the Closed Access deposit during the embargo, thereby enhancing the scope of the institutional repository's eprint-request Button.)

But the practical fact is that there's nothing much that Springer or anyone can do about authors sharing their own papers before the embargo elapses through social sharing sites like RG or AE or others. Publishers' only recourse is to send individual take-down notices to RG/AE, with which RG/AE can duly comply -- only to have the authors put them right back up again soon after.

OA is unstoppable, if authors want it, and they do. They're all just being too slow about realizing it, and doing it (as the computer scientists and physicists saw and did 20 years ago, no questions asked).

That's why the OA mandates are needed. And they're coming...

This is a comment on Richard Poynder's interview on Emerald's "fading" Green OA policy.

Both the perverse effects of the UK's Finch/RCUK policy and their antidote are as simple to describe and understand as they were to predict:

The Perverse Effects of the Finch/RCUK Policy: Besides being eager to cash in on the double-paid (subscription fees + Gold OA fees), double-dipped over-priced hybrid Gold bonanza that Finch/RCUK has foolishly dangled before their eyes, publishers like Emerald are also trying to hedge their bets and clinch the deal by adopting or extending Green OA embargoes to try to force authors to pick and pay for the hybrid Gold option instead of picking cost-free Green.

The Antidote to the Perverse Effects of the Finch/RCUK Policy: To remedy this, both funders and institutions need merely (1) distinguish deposit-date from the date that access to the deposit is made OA, (2) mandate immediate-deposit, and (3) implement the repository's facilitated eprint request Button to tide over user needs during any OA embargo.

All funders and institutions can and should adopt the immediate-deposit mandate immediately. Together with the Button it moots embargoes (and once widely adopted, will ensure emargoes' inevitable and deserved demise).

And as an insurance policy (and a fitting one, to counterbalance publishers' insurance policy of prolonging Green embargoes to try to force authors to pay for hybrid Gold) funders and institutions should (4) designate date-stamped immediate-deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting published papers for annual performance review (e.g., the Liège policy) or for national research assessment (as HEFCE has proposed for REF).

As to the page that Emerald has borrowed from Elsevier, consisting of pseudo-legal double-talk implying that

"you may deposit immediately if you needn't, but not if you must"

That is pure FUD and can and should be completely ignored. (Any author foolish enough to be taken in by such double-talk deserves all the needless usage and impact losses they will get!)

The Global Research Council’s Open Access Action Plan is, overall, timely and welcome, but it is far too focused on OA as (“Gold”) OA publishing, rather than on OA itself (online access to peer-reviewed research free for all).

And although GRC does also discuss OA self-archiving in repositories (“Green” OA), it does not seem to understand Green OA’s causal role in OA itself, nor does it assign it its proper priority.

There is also no mention at all of the most important, effective and rapidly growing OA plan of action, which is for both funders and institutions to mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving. Hence neither does the action plan give any thought to the all-important task of designing Green OA mandates and ensuring that they have an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring compliance.

The plan says:

“The major principles and aims of the Action Plan are simple: they are (a) encouragement and support for publishing in open access journals, (b) encouragement and support for author self-deposit into open access repositories, and (c) the creation and inter-connection of repositories.”

Sounds like it covers everything -- (a) Gold, (b) Green, and (c) Gold+Green – but the devil is in the details, the causal contingencies, and hence the priorities and sequence of action.

“In transitioning to open access, efficient mechanisms to shift money from subscription budgets into open access publication funds need to be developed.”

But the above statement is of course not about transitioning to OA itself, but just about transitioning to OA publishing (Gold OA).

And the GRC’s action plans for this transition are putting the cart before the horse.

There are very strong, explicit reasons why Green OA needs to come first -- rather than double-paying for Gold pre-emptively (subscriptions plus Gold) without first having effectively mandated Green, since it is Green OA that will drive the transition to Gold OA at a fair, affordable, sustainable price:

Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

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).

Action 5: Develop an integrated funding stream for hybrid open access

Worst of all, the GRC action plan proposes to encourage and support hybrid Gold OA, with publishing not just being paid for doubly (via subscriptions to subscription publishers + via Gold OA fees to Gold OA publishers) but, in the case of hybrid Gold, with the double-payment going to the very same publisher, which not only entails double-payment by the research community, but allows double-dipping by the publisher.

That is the way to leave both the price and the timetable for any transition to OA in the hands of the publisher.

Action 6: Monitor and assess the affordability of open access

There is no point monitoring the affordability of Gold OA today, at a stage when it is just a needless double-payment, at the publisher’s current arbitrary, inflated Gold OA asking price.

What does need monitoring is compliance with mandates to provide cost-free Green OA, while subscriptions are still paying in full (and fulsomely) for the cost of publication, as they are today.

Action 7: Work with scholarly societies to transition society journals into open access

The only thing needed from publishers today – whether scholarly or commercial – is that they not embargo Green OA. Most (60%) don’t.

The transition to Gold OA will only come after Green OA has made subscriptions unsustainable, which will not only induce publishers to cut obsolete costs, downsize and convert to Gold OA, but it will also release the concomitant institutional subscription cancellation windfall savings to pay the price of that affordable, sustainable post-Green Gold.

Action 8: Supporting self-archiving through funding guidelines and copyright regulations
“The deposit of publications in open access repositories is often hampered not only by legal uncertainties, but also by the authors’ reluctance to take on such additional tasks. Funding agencies will address this issue by exploring whether and how authors can be encouraged and supported in retaining simple copyrights as a precondition to self-archiving. In doing so, funders will also address authors’ need to protect the integrity of their publications by providing guidance on suitable licenses for such purpose.”

Yes, Green OA needs to be supported. But the way to do that is certainly not just to “encourage” authors to retain copyright and to self-archive.

It is (1) to mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving (as 288 funders and institutions are already doing: see ROARMAP), (2) to adopt effective mandates that moot publisher OA embargoes by requiring immediate-deposit, whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed, and (3) to designate institutional repository deposit as the mechanism for making articles eligible for research performance review. Then institutions will (4) monitor and ensure that their own research output is being deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Action 9: Negotiate publisher services to facilitate deposit in open access repositories

Again, the above is a terribly counterproductive proposal. On no account should it be left up to publishers to deposit articles.

For subscription publishers, it is in their interests to gain control over the Green OA deposit process, thereby making sure that it is done on their timetable (if it is done at all).

For Gold OA, it’s already OA, so depositing it in a repository is no challenge.

It has to be remembered and understood that the “self” in self-archiving is the author. The keystrokes don’t have to be personally executed by the author (students, librarians, secretaries can do the keystrokes too). But they should definitely not be left to publishers to do!

Green OA mandates are adopted to ensure that the keystrokes get done, and on time. Most journal are not Gold OA, but a Green OA mandate requires immediate deposit whether or not the journal is Gold OA, and whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed.

Action 10: Work with publishers to find intelligent billing solutions for the increasing amount of open access articles

The challenge is not to find “billing solutions” for the minority of articles that are published as Gold OA today. The challenge if to adopt an effective, verifiable Green OA mandate to self-archive all articles.

Action 11: Work with repository organisations to develop efficient mechanisms for harvesting and accessing information

This is a non-problem. Harvesting and accessing OA content is already powerful and efficient.

It can of course be made incomparably more powerful and efficient. But there is no point or incentive in doing this while the target content is still so sparse – because it has not yet been made OA (whether Green or Gold)!

Only about 10 – 40% of content is OA most fields.

The way to drive that up to the 100% that it could already have been for years is to mandate Green OA.

Then (and only then) will be there be the motivation to “develop [ever more] efficient mechanisms for harvesting and accessing [OA] information”

Action 12: Explore new ways to assess quality and impact of research articles

This too is happening already, and is not really an OA matter. But once most articles are OA, OA itself will generate rich new ways of measuring quality and impact.

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1)

(Some of these comments have already been made in connection with Richard Poynder's intreview of Johannes Fournier.)

Comment on Richard Poynder's "The UK’s Open Access Policy: Controversy Continues":

Yes, the Finch/RCUK policy has had its predictable perverse effects:

1. sustaining arbitrary, bloated Gold OA fees
2. wasting scarce research funds
3. double-paying publishers [subscriptions plus Gold]
4. handing subscription publishers a hybrid-gold-mine
5. enabling hybrid publishers to double-dip
6. abrogating authors' freedom of journal-choice [based on cost-recovery model, embargo or licence instead of on quality]
7. imposing re-mix licenses that many authors don't want and most users and fields don't need
8. inspiring subscription publishers to adopt and lengthen Green OA embargoes [to maxmize hybrid-gold revenues]
9. handicapping Green OA mandates worldwide [by incentivizing embargoes]
10. allowing journal-fleet publishers to confuse and exploit institutions and authors even more

But the solution is also there (as already adopted in Francophone Belgium and proposed by the UKèsHEFCE for REF):

a. funders and institutions mandate immediate-deposit
b. of the peer-reviewed final draft
c. in the author's institutional repository
d. immediately upon acceptance for publication
e. whether journal is subscription or Gold
f. whether access to the deposit is immedate-OA or embargoed
g. whether license is transfered, retained or CC-BY;
h. institutions implement repository's facilitated email eprint request Button;
i. institutions designate immediate-deposit the mechanism for submitting publications for research performance assessment;
j. institutions monitor and ensure immediate-deposit mandate compliance

This policy restores author choice, moots publisher embargoes, makes Gold and CC-BY completely optional, provides the incentive for author compliance and the natural institutional mechanism for verifying it, consolidates funder and institutional mandates; hastens the natural death of OA embargoes, the onset of universal Green OA, and the resultant institutional subscription cancellations, journal downsizing and transition to Fair-Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price, paid out of institutional subscription cancellation savings instead of over-priced, double-paid, double-dipped Fool's-Gold. And of course Fair-Gold OA will license all the re-use rights users need and authors want to allow.