Open Access Archivangelism

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Michael Smith [MS] (Anthropology, ASU, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

MS: "The practice of author payment for open access journals may work for the hard sciences, but it presents major difficulties for various categories of scholars..."

Paying to publish journal articles presents difficulties for any author who does not have the money to pay, regardless of field. But it is not an obstacle to providing Open Access (OA) itself:

Although only about 10% of journals are OA journals ("Gold OA Publishing"), over 62% of journals are "Green," meaning that they have already given their green light to all their authors to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts ("postprints") OA by depositing them in their own Institutional (or Central) Repositories (IRs) upon acceptance for publication -- and immediately making them OA ("Green OA Self-Archiving"). Another 29% of journals endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the pre-refereeing preprint, with embargoes of various lengths on making the postprint OA.

(The IR software also makes it possible for all users to request and for all authors to provide almost-instant almost-OA even for Closed or Embargoed Access postprints on an individual Fair-Use basis by means of a semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" button. That means 62% instant OA plus 38% almost-instant almost-OA.)

OA self-archiving (Green OA) costs nothing. But it should also be pointed out that the majority of Gold OA journals today do not charge for publication -- and those that do, waive the fee if the author cannot afford to pay. (The much larger number of hybrid-Gold publishers -- offering the author the option to pay for Gold OA -- do not waive the Gold OA fee, but most of them are also Green.)

MS: "(1) social sciences and humanities, where grants are smaller and fewer than in the natural and physical sciences."

All authors in the social sciences and humanities should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(2) graduate students and younger scholars."

All graduate students and younger scholars should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(3) scholars in the third world."

Scholars in the third world should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "The author-pay model puts people in the above categories (and others) at a serious disadvantage. It would effectively leave out an entire sector of scholarship in the third world. Panglossian arguments about convincing funding agencies to pay for author charges, or transferring university library budgets from subscriptions to author charges, ignore the current financial plight of research in most of the world today."

No need of Pangloss for OA: All authors can provide Green OA to articles (62% immediate full OA, 38% almost-immediate almost-OA) by self-archiving their postprints in their IRs, today.

Green OA self-archiving mandates from researchers' own institutions and funders are now on the way worldwide. (The US congress has recently approved a particular big NIH Green OA Mandate, in a Health Bill which has just been vetoed by President Bush, but it may still be adopted if the veto is over-ridden, and could be implemented by NIH and US universities in light of congressional adoption in either case. Six of seven UK research funding councils have already mandated Green OA after it was recommended but not adopted by Parliament. There are already a total of 32 funder and university mandates adopted worldwide, and at least nine more proposed or pending.)

Once adopted globally, these Green OA mandates will immediately provide 62% OA and 38% almost-OA, and the Closed Access embargoes will soon recede under the growing pressure from the powerful and obvious benefits of OA to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the tax-paying public that funds them, and the vast R&D industry.

(Eventually, 100% Green OA may even lead to the cancellation of non-OA journals, thereby releasing those institutional subscription funds to pay the much lower costs of Gold OA publishing for an institution's researchers -- costs which reduce to just those of peer-review alone, with all access-provision and archiving now offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA IRs.)

But there is no need to keep waiting for Gold OA: Green OA can be provided right now.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

---

---

SUMMARY: Kurtz & Henneken (2007) report that the citation advantage of astrophysics papers self-archived as preprints in Arxiv is caused by (1) Early Advantage (EA) (earlier citations for papers self-archived earlier) and (2) Quality Bias (QB) (a self-selection bias toward self-archiving higher quality papers) and not by (3) Open Access (OA) itself (being freely accessible online to those who cannot afford subscription-toll access).
   K & H suggest: "[T]here is no 'Open Access Advantage' for papers from the Astrophysical Journal" because "in a well funded field like astrophysics essentially everyone who is in a position to write research articles has full access to the literature."
   This seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation for K&H's findings. Where there is no access problem, OA cannot be the cause of whatever higher citation count is observed for self-archived articles.
   We (Hajjem & Harnad 2007) have conducted a similar study, but across the full spectrum of disciplines, measuring the citation advantage for mandated and unmandated self-archiving for articles from four Institutional Repositories that have self-archiving mandates, each compared to articles in the very same journal and year by authors from other institutions (on the assumption that mandated self-archiving should have less of a self-selection Quality Bias than unmandated self-archiving).
   We again confirmed the citation advantage for self-archiving, and found no difference in the size of that advantage for mandated and unmandated self-archiving. It is likely that the size of the access problem differs from field to field, and with it the size of the OA citation advantage. Evidence suggests that most fields are not nearly as well-heeled as astrophysics.

---

Kurtz & Henneken (2007) report a very interesting new result:

"We demonstrate conclusively that there is no 'Open Access Advantage' for papers from the Astrophysical Journal. The two to one citation advantage enjoyed by papers deposited in the arXiv e-print server is due entirely to the nature and timing of the deposited papers. This may have implications for other disciplines."

Earlier, Kurtz et al. (2005) had shown that the lion's share of the citation advantage of astrophysics papers self-archived as preprints in Arxiv was caused by (1) Early Advantage (EA) (earlier citations for papers self-archived earlier) and (2) Quality Bias (QB) (a self-selection bias toward self-archiving higher quality papers) and not by (3) Open Access (OA) itself (being freely accessible online to those who cannot afford subscription-toll access).

Kurtz et al. explained their finding by suggesting that:

"in a well funded field like astrophysics essentially everyone who is in a position to write research articles has full access to the literature."

This seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation for their findings. Where there is no access problem, OA cannot be the cause of whatever higher citation count is observed for self-archived articles. Moed (2007) has recently reported a similar result in Condensed Matter Physics, and so have Davis & Fromerth (2007) in 4 mathematics journals.

Kurtz & Henneken's latest study confirms and strengthens their prior finding: They compared citation counts for articles published in two successive years of the Astrophysical Journal. For one of the years, the journal was freely accessible to everyone; for the other it was only accessible to subscribers. The citation counts for the self-archived articles, as expected, were twice as high as for the non-self-archived articles. They then compared the citation-counts for non-self-archived articles in the free-access year and in the toll-access year, and found no difference. They concluded, again, that OA does not cause increased citations.

But of course K&H's prior explanation -- which is that there is no access problem in astrophysics -- applies here too: It means that in a field where there is no access problem, whatever citation advantage comes from making an article OA by self-archiving cannot be an OA effect.

K&H conclude that "[t]his may have implications for other disciplines."

It should be evident, however, that the degree to which this has implications for other disciplines depends largely on the degree to which it is true in other disciplines that "essentially everyone who is in a position to write research articles has full access to the literature."

We (Hajjem & Harnad 2007) have conducted (and are currently replicating) a similar study, but across the full spectrum of disciplines, measuring the citation advantage for mandated and unmandated self-archiving for articles from 4 Institutional Repositories that have self-archiving mandates (three universities plus CERN), each compared to articles in the very same journal and year by authors from other institutions (on the assumption that mandated self-archiving should have less of a self-selection quality bias than unmandated self-archiving).

Figure 1. Self-Selected Self-Archiving vs. Mandated Self-Archiving: Within-Journal Citation Ratios (for 2004, 4 mandating institutions, all fields). S = citation counts for articles self-archived at institutions with (Sm) and without (Sn) a self-archiving mandate. N = citation counts for non-archived articles at institutions with (Nm) and without (Nn) mandate (i.e., Nm = articles not yet compliant with mandate). Grand average of (log) S/N ratios (106,203 articles; 279 journals) is the OA advantage (18%); this is about the same as for Sn/Nn (27972 articles, 48 journals, 18%) and Sn/N (17%); ratio is higher for Sm/N (34%), higher still for Sm/Nm (57%, 541 articles, 20 journals); and Sm/Sn = 27%, so self-selected self-archiving does not yield more citations than mandated (if anything, it is rather the reverse). (All six within-pair differences are significant: correlated sample t-tests.)
(NB: preliminary, unrefereed results.)

We again confirmed the citation advantage for self-archiving, and found no difference in the size of that advantage for mandated and unmandated self-archiving. (The finding of an equally large self-archiving advantage for mandated and unmandated self-archiving was also confirmed for CERN, whose articles are all in physics -- although one could perhaps argue that CERN articles enjoy a quality advantage over articles from other institutions.)

A few closing points:

(1) It is likely that the size of the access problem differs from field to field, and with it the size of the OA citation advantage. Evidence suggests that most fields are not nearly as well-heeled as astrophysics. According to a JISC survey, 48% of researchers overall (biomedical sciences 53%, physical/engineering sciences 42%, social sciences 47%, language/linguistics 48% and arts/humanities 53%) have difficulty in gaining access to the resources they need to do their research. (The ARL statistics on US university serials holdings is consistent with this.) The overall access difficulty is roughly congruent with the reported OA access advantage.

(2) In Condensed Matter physics (and perhaps also mathematics) there is the further complication that it is mostly just preprints that are being self-archived, which reduces the scope for observing any postprint advantage, as opposed to just an Early Advantage (EA). (In fields that do have a significant access problem, the "Early Advantage" for postprints is the OA Advantage!) OA self-archiving mandates (and the OA movement in general) target refereed, accepted postprints, not unrefereed preprints.

(3) The positive correlation is between citation counts and the number of self-archived articles in each citation-range (Hajjem et al 2005). This could be caused by Quality Bias (QB) (higher quality articles being more likely to be self-archived) or Quality Advantage (QA) (higher quality articles benefiting more from being self-archived) or both. (The top 50% of articles tend to be cited 10 times as often as the bottom 50% [Seglen 1992]. This has nothing to do with OA or self-archiving.)

(4) Citations are of course not the only potential advantage of self-archiving. Downloads can increase too (Brody et al. 2006).

(5) We are now in the Institutional Repository (IR) era. Arxiv is a venerable Central Repository, one of the biggest and oldest and most successful of them all. But, institutions are the sources of OA content, institutions are in the best position to mandate self-archiving, and institutions share with their authors the benefits of enhancing the accessibility, usage and impact of their research output. Moreover, the nature of the web is distributed local websites, harvested by central service providers, rather than central websites.

Stevan Harnad

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

Davis, P. M. and Fromerth, M. J. (2007) Does the arXiv lead to higher citations and reduced publisher downloads for mathematics articles? Scientometics, Vol. 71, No. 2.

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.

Hajjem, C. and Harnad, S. (2007) The Open Access Citation Advantage: Quality Advantage Or Quality Bias? Technical Report, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

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

Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C. S., Demleitner, M., Murray, S. S. (2005, The Effect of Use and Access on Citations. Information Processing and Management, 41, 1395-1402)

Moed, H. F. (2007) The effect of 'open access' on citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's condensed matter section, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) , August 30, 2007.

Seglen, P. O. (1992) The skewness of science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43:628-38

The UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is now the 6th of the 7 UK Research Councils to adopt a Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

That makes AHRC's the 18th funder OA mandate worldwide, in addition to 14 university and departmental mandates, 2 proposed multi-university mandates, and 4 proposed funder mandates, for a total of 38 Green OA mandates adopted or proposed so far.

Like most of the mandates adopted so far, the AHRC has some needless, easily-corrected flaws, but first, let us (with Dr. Johnson) applaud the fact that it has been adopted at all: Bravo AHRC!

Now the mandate's altogether unnecessary and ever-so-easily-corrected flaw:

In their anxiety to ensure that their policy is both legal and not needlessly worrisome for publishers, AHRC (and many of the other funder mandates, including yesterday's CIHR mandate from Canada) have allowed an embargo period before the article is made OA, if the publisher wishes.

That is fine. But it is a huge mistake to allow the time at which the article must be deposited to be dictated by the publisher's embargo.

The deposit should be required immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exception. If there is no publisher embargo, that deposit is also immediately made Open Access at that same time. Otherwise it is made Closed Access for the duration of the embargo period. (Only the bibliographic metadata are visible and accessible via the web, not the article itself.)

It may seem pointless to require an article to be deposited immediately if it cannot be made OA immediately. But the point of requiring immediate deposit either way is to close a profound loophole that could otherwise delay both deposit and OA indefinitely, turning the mandate into a mockery from which any researcher can opt out at the behest of his publisher.

The early mandators have been very progressive and helpful in having adopted OA mandates at all, but now that mandates are spreading, it is important to optimize them, and plug the needless loopholes. Otherwise the mandates will suffer the same fate as the ill-fated NIH Public Access Policy, which failed so badly that its self-archiving rate was even lower than the spontaenous baseline for random self-archiving, in the absence of any policy at all. (The proposed NIH policy upgrade to a mandate is now one of the 4 pending funder mandate proposals).

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

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

OA mandators (and those proposing or contemplating OA mandates): Please consult the above links, as well as Peter Suber's critique below, and then do the minor tweaks that are the only thing needed to transform your policies into reliable, effective mandates, setting an example worthy of emulation by others.

---

Peter Suber in Open Access News wrote:

The UK Arts & Humanities Research Council announced its long-awaited OA policy today. You can find it on the AHRC access policy page and in Appendix 9 of its lengthy (111 pp.) Research Funding Guide for 2007/08:

It is the AHRC’s position that authors choose where to place their research for publication. It is for authors’ institutions to decide whether they are prepared to use funds for any page charges or other publishing fees. Such funds could be part of an institution’s indirect costs under the full economic costing regime....

The AHRC requires that funded researchers:

   -- ensure deposit of a copy of any resultant articles published in journals or conference proceedings in appropriate repository

   -- wherever possible, ensure deposit of the bibliographical metadata relating to such articles, including a link to the publisher’s website, at or around the time of publication

Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example, embargo periods and provisions limiting the use of deposited content to noncommercial purposes, are respected by authors.

The final paragraph is emphasized (in bold type) in the Funding Guide but not emphasized on the access policy page.

Comments.

-- I applaud the mandatory language. But the policy is sketchy on most other important details. It doesn’t indicate which version should be deposited or what counts as an appropriate repository. It urges immediate deposit for metadata but doesn’t do so for the text itself. It gives no timetable for depositing the text and no maximum length for the delay or embargo.

-- It gives nearly as much space to the exception as it does to the policy, and creates the same gigantic loophole as the new CIHR policy and the older ESRC policy. If publishers don’t want their authors to make any version of their articles OA, they only have to adopt a house rule to that effect and suddenly the AHRC policy does not apply to AHRC grantees who submit work to that publisher.

--The AHRC is the sixth of the seven Research Councils UK to announce its OA policy. If this kind of mandatory language qualified by a vitiating exception can be called a mandate, then it’s also the sixth to adopt a mandate. The other five are at the BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC. The EPSRC is still deliberating. Of the six RCUK OA policies, three allow authors to use grant funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals (MRC, NERC, STFC) and three do not (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC).

Peter Suber, Open Access News

---

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: The ethical case for Open Access (OA) (free online access) to research findings is especially salient when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions. But the ethical imperative for OA is far more general: It applies to all scientific and scholarly research findings published in peer-reviewed journals. And peer-to-peer access is far more important than direct public access. Most research is funded to be conducted and published, by researchers, in order to be taken up, used, and built upon in further research and applications, again by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funded it -- not in order to generate revenue for the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry (nor even because there is a burning public desire to read [much of] it). Hence OA needs to be mandated for all research.

---

1. All peer-reviewed research articles are written for the purpose of being accessed, used, applied and built upon by all their potential users, everywhere, not in order to generate royalty income for their author (or their publisher). (This is not true of writing in general, e.g., newspaper and magazine articles by journalists, or books. It is only true, without exception, of peer-reviewed research journal articles, and it is true in all disciplines, without exception.)

2. Research productivity and progress, and hence researchers' careers, salary, research funding, reputation, and prizes all depend on the usage and application of their research findings ("research impact"). This is enshrined in the academic mandate to "publish or perish," and in the reward system of academic research.

3. The reason the academic reward system is set up that way is that that is also how research institutions and research funders benefit from the research output they produce and fund: by maximizing its usage and impact. That is also how the cumulative research cycle itself progresses and grows, along with the benefits it provides for society, the public that funds it: In order to be used, applied, and built upon, research needs to be accessible to all its potential users (and not only to those that can afford access to the journals in which the research happens to be published.).

4. Open Access (OA) -- free online access -- has been demonstrated to increase research usage and impact by 25%-250% or more. This "OA Advantage" has been found in all fields: natural sciences, biomedical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities.

5. Hence it is true, without exception, in all fields, that the potential research benefit is there, if only the research is made OA.

6. OA has only become possible since the onset of the online era.

7. Research can be made OA in two ways:

(7a) Research can be made "Gold OA" by publishing it in an OA journal that makes it free online (with some OA journals, but not all, covering their costs by charging the author-institution for publishing it rather than by charging the user-institution for accessing it; many Gold OA journals today still continue to cover their costs via subscriptions to the paper edition).

(7b) Or research can be made "Green OA" by publishing it in a conventional, non-OA journal, but also self-archiving it in the author's Institutional Repository, free for all.

8. Despite its benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research, only about 15% of researchers are spontaneously self-archiving their research today (Green OA). (A somewhat lower percentage is publishing in Gold OA journals, deterred in part by the cost.)

9. Only Green OA is entirely within the hands of the research community. Researchers' funders and institutions cannot (hence should not) mandate Gold OA; but they can mandate Green OA, as a natural extension of their "publish or perish" mandate, to maximize research usage and impact in the online era. Institutions and funders are now actually beginning to adopt Green OA mandates especially in the UK, and also in Europe and Australia; the US is only beginning to propose Green OA mandates.

10. Some publishers are lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates, claiming it will destroy peer review and publishing. All existing evidence, however, is contrary to this. (In the few fields where Green OA already reached 100% some years ago, the journals are still not being canceled.) Moreover, it is quite clear that even if and when 100% Green OA should ever lead to unsustainable subscription cancellations, journals can and will simply convert to Gold OA and institutions will then cover their own outgoing Gold OA publishing costs by redirecting part of their windfall subscription cancellation savings on incoming journal articles to cover instead the Gold OA publishing costs for their own outgoing journal article output. The net cost will also be much lower, as it will only need to pay for peer review and its certification by the journal-name, as the distributed network of OA Institutional Repositories will be the online access-providers and archivers (and the paper edition will be obsolete).

11. One of the ways the OA movement is countering the lobbying of publishers against Green OA mandates is by forming the "Alliance for Taxpayer Access." This lobbying group is focusing mainly on biomedicine, and the potential health benefits of tax-payer access to biomedical research. This is definitely a valid ethical and practical rationale for OA, but it is definitely not the sole rationale, nor the primary one.

12. The primary, fundamental and universal rationale for OA and OA mandates, in all disciplines, including biomedicine, is researcher-to-researcher access, not public access (nor even educational access). The vast majority of peer-reviewed research in all disciplines is not of direct interest to the lay public (nor even to students, other than graduate students, who are already researchers). And even in biomedical research, what provides the greatest public benefit is the potential research progress (leading to eventual applications that benefit the public) that arises from maximizing researcher-to-researcher access. Direct public access of course comes with the OA territory. But it is not the sole or primary ethical justification for OA, even in biomedical research.

13. The general ethical rationale and justification for OA is that research is funded, conducted and published in order to be used and applied, not in order to generate revenue for the journal publishing industry. In the paper era, the only way to achieve the former was by allowing access to be restricted to those researchers whose institutions could afford to subscribe to the paper edition. That was the only way the true and sizable costs of peer-reviewed research publishing could be covered at all, then.

14. But in the online era this is no longer true. Hence it is time for the institutions and funders who employ the researchers and fund the research to mandate that the resulting journal articles be made (Green) OA, to the benefit of the entire research community, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public. (This may or may not eventually lead to a transition to Gold OA.)

15. It is unethical for the publishing tail to be allowed to continue to wag the research dog. The dysfunctionality of the status quo is especially apparent when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions, but the situation is much the same for all scientific and technological research, and for scholarship too, inasmuch as we see and fund scholarly research as a public good, not as a subsidy to the peer-reviewed journal industry.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: Professor Imboden's excellent essay in Research Europe points out that the defeat of the EC's proposed Green Open Access self-archiving mandate by the publishing lobby in Brussels in March is likely to prove to have been only a temporary triumph. The mandate, recommended in 2004 by the UK Select Committee and in 2005 by Berlin 3 in Southampton, has already been adopted by about 30 institutions and funders; counter-lobbying against the publisher lobby is growing -- in the UK, Europe, the US, Brazil, Australia and Asia -- to embolden institutions and funders to adopt the mandate; and the clamour just keeps getting louder.
   Professor Imboden also recommends that research funders should not buy into hybrid Gold OA at this time. They should only mandate Green OA self-archiving. Research funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's cautions about pre-emptive Gold OA, and about the need carefully to think things through, for both scalability and sustainability. And meanwhile, full speed ahead on mandating Green OA!

---

These are (belated) comments on a very timely and important paper by Dieter Imboden (President, Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation) that appeared in Research Europe at the end of March. These comments appear as a letter in Research Europe 12 July 2007:

Publishers Divide and Rule on Open Access
Dieter Imboden, Research Europe, 29 March 2007

Professor Imboden's piece is excellent: Exactly on target, it raises all the crucial issues, and is still very timely. (It appeared in March when the EC meeting took place.)

..."a paradox over access to that knowledge, which has defeated even the Commission, at least for the moment, judging by its communication last month on open access publishing..."

Professor Imboden is quite right to point out this defeat of the EC's proposed Green Open Access self-archiving mandate by the publishing lobby. There is reason for hope, however, that that defeat will prove only to have been a temporary one.

"The clamour of the research community for open access publishing..."

The clamour is actually for Open Access (not necessarily for Open Access Publishing (Gold OA), which is only one of the two ways to provide Open Access -- and not the surest or fastest way, which is Open Access Self-Archiving (Green OA), as Professor Imboden himself later notes in his essay).

"open access means 'free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles'. Obviously, this would bring the traditional reader-paid publication system to an end."

That outcome is perhaps likely, but it not obvious: No one knows how long there will still be a demand for the print edition, nor whether and when Green OA self-archiving would make subscriptions unsustainable. The only sure and obvious thing is that 100% Green OA self-archiving will provide 100% OA (and that 100% OA is a huge benefit to research that is already fully within reach: all that needs to be done is to mandate it).

"When libraries began to cancel journal subscriptions for financial reasons, funders saw an important pillar of their research policy dwindling. As a result, many signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003."

Many may have signed the Berlin Declaration because of journal unaffordability, but many others have signed because of research inaccessibility. OA is not primarily about journal economics but about research access.

"The declaration requires researchers to deposit their manuscripts in an open-access repository or to make sure that papers published in traditional journals are accessible free of charge after not more than 6 to 12 months."

Alas, the Berlin Declaration itself does not require this, and hence the many signatories have not committed themselves to this. However, the UK Select Committee (2004) and Berlin 3 (Southampton 2005) do recommend requiring this, and ROARMAP lists the c. 30 institutions and funders that have already adopted such a requirement, and several more that have proposed it.

"In reality, however, still only a very small fraction of authors fully exploit the potential of the traditional system."

Yes, and this is because only about 30 institutions and funders have as yet required the Berlin 3 Policy recommendation. Counter-lobbying against the publisher lobby is growing -- in the UK, Europe, the US, Brazil, Australia and Asia -- to embolden institutions and funders to adopt the mandate; and the clamour just keeps getting louder.

"[S]ome (mostly private) research funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute... ask their grantees to publish exclusively in pure or hybrid open-access journals, with free online access to author-paid articles."

Strictly speaking, Wellcome and HHMI merely require that their authors make their articles OA, whether the Green or the Gold way.

"If a library pays for online access, it means access to articles supported by HHMI or the Wellcome Trust is paid for twice. Thus, at least during a transition time, the well-intended initiative of some funders will pump even more money into the commercial publishing system."

This is absolutely correct, and points out a deep strategic error or shortsight on the part of HHMI and Wellcome. Funders should not pay for hybrid Gold OA at this time. They should only mandate Green OA self-archiving. (If they have funds to spare, let them spend them on supporting more research!)

"...changing to a total open-access world would shift the financial burden from institutions to funders [and] the research system as a whole... the distribution of public money for research (whether national or European) would have to change accordingly -- either by reducing support to institutions or by increasing the budgets of funders."

This shift would only happen if we agreed to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA now. If we instead only mandate Green OA, and let time and the market decide whether and when subscriptions become unsustainable, then, if and when subscriptions do become unsustainable (a portion of) the resulting institutional windfall subscription cancellation savings themselves can be redirected to pay for Gold OA, without the need to divert any new research or institutional funds. There is already more than enough money "in the system" (as Peter Suber puts it) now to pay all publishing costs. Gold OA will not cost more -- indeed it will cost a good deal less (only the cost of peer review, with Institutional Repositories taking over the distributed burden of archiving and access-provision).

"If every funder, small or large, weak or powerful, has to negotiate individually with the various publishers, we will be back where we began -- in a publishing world where economic power dictates the deals between libraries and publishers. Was not the feeling that scientists and libraries were at the mercy of big publishing companies one reason for the open-access initiative in the first place? It would be a tremendous mistake just to replace one victim by another -- that is to free the institutions at the expense of the funders. What can we do instead?

"Remember: the main issue is not to save money, but to provide fairer access to scientific information."

Hear, Hear! Pre-emptive payment for hybrid Gold OA is a Trojan Horse, and funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's words.

Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor

"So, funders and institutions should proceed together on the route to open access. The green route is easy and without major problems, but a good and just strategy for the golden route is still missing. Even if the intentions are good, we should not rush into unknown territory without considering the consequences."

Again, research funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's cautions about pre-emptive Gold OA, and the need carefully to think things through, for both scalability and sustainability. But meanwhile, full speed ahead on mandating Green OA!

"Not all the funders have the same opportunities. Not all the disciplines are as powerful as particle physics, which, according to CERN director Robert Aymar, can easily finance the transition of the few journals in the field to complete open access."

Not all physicists are so sanguine about CERN's pre-emptive move toward Gold OA:

Harnad, John (and others) (2007) Debating the future of physics publishing. Physics World 29 (3): 22

"Let us -- scientists, funders, institutions, libraries and publishers -- talk together, before too many new boundary conditions make a rational solution difficult."

Indeed. And meanwhile, full speed ahead with Green OA mandates!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The interest and commitment of some of the supporters of Open Access (OA) is derived from and motivated by the importance of making health-related research accessible to those who need it: patients, family, researchers.

This is certainly an important component of OA, and perhaps the aspect that most directly touches our lives. But if OA is seen or portrayed as being mainly a health-related matter, it not only leaves out the vast majority of OA's target content-- which is all research in all research areas, from the physical and biological sciences to the social sciences and the humanities -- but it even under-serves OA's potential benefits to health research itself.

Even the "tax-payer access" aspect of OA, though important, is not quite representative, because the primary benefit of OA to the tax-payer who pays for the research is not that it makes the research freely accessible to the tax-payer (although it does indeed do that too!), but that it makes the research freely accessible to the researchers for whom it was mostly written, but many of whom cannot afford access to it -- so that they can use, apply and build upon that research, in their own research -- to the benefit of the tax-payers who funded it and for whose sake the research is conducted. Again, a focus on the need for direct public access to health-related research leaves out the vast majority of research that is not health-related and that the public has no particular interest in reading -- but a great interest in making accessible to those who can use and build on it so as to increase research progress, which may in its turn eventually lead to applications that benefit the public.

Paradoxically, it is in recognizing and supporting OA's much more general research enhancing mission that we can also best support its health-related potential.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: Jean-Claude Guédon [J-CG] has suggested that (1) the percentage of non-OA journals that are subsidised may be closer to 50% than 5%, and that hence (2) OA self-archiving mandates could also mandate the conversion of those subsidised journals to OA. It is not clear, however, (i) whether the percentage of national journals that are subsidised is representative of the total percentage of the world's 24,000 journals that are subsidised. The right question is: (ii) what percentage of a nation's research output is published in subsidised journals? A second, unavoidable question is: (iii) where in the quality hierarchy of 24,000 peer-reviewed journals do the subsidised journals tend to fall? (The answer to (ii) and (iii) will differ by both nation and discipline.) In any case, the adoption of the proposed OA self-archiving mandates (such as the US FRPAA proposal or the European Commission's A1 recommendation) should on no account be handicapped by trying to add to them a mandate to convert subsidised journals to OA. The same is true of individual institutional self-archiving mandates. The efforts to convert subsidised journals to OA should proceed separately, in parallel. Once self-archiving mandates prevail, the need to convert journals to OA will in any case become a far less urgent one, and no longer an OA matter. (Kimmo Kuusela has provided some helpful data for Finland.)

---

On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Jean-Claude Guédon [J-CG] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

J-CG: "Samples available certainly place the [proportion of journals that are subsidised at] closer to 50% than to 5%."

I am afraid I'm still not sure that's accurate (or if so, what it means).

If it were really true that half of the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals are subsidised, it would be important to know which half -- top or bottom? This is not snobbery: The need for OA is definitely top-down insofar as the user-end need for access is concerned. What users need first and foremost is access to the articles in the best journals.

And on the author-end, although all authors yearn for more impact, the findings are that the size of the OA Advantage is greater for the higher quality articles (the "Quality Advantage," QA) in that the proportion of self-archived articles is higher in the higher citation brackets. (This is the effect that some have interpreted -- wrongly, in my opinion, -- as a non-causal Self-Selection effect, or Quality Bias, QB, rather than QA. There is both a noncausal QB and a causal QA component in the OA advantage, and I am betting QA is the bigger component). The majority of articles are not cited at all, and for the worst of them, making them OA does not help! OA allows the best work -- the work destined to be used and built upon -- to be used fully, and to be built upon purely on the basis of its quality and relevance, no longer limited by its affordability (hence accessibility).

Even if half of a country's national journals are subsidised, it does not follow that half of that country's research output is published in its national journals, let alone subsidised journals. (And that's without even asking which half.)

J-CG: "I am not sure one can compare hypothetical... money that might have been earned... with actual cash outlay [in pitting money actually spent on subsidising journals against the hypothetical monetary value of lost potential research impact]."

I'm afraid that here I disagree very fundamentally: Although the serials crisis definitely helped alert us to the OA problem, historically, OA is not in fact about saving money spent on journals -- neither the money spent on subscribing to overpriced journals nor the money spent subsidising journals. It is about ending the needless loss of potential research access and impact. And the estimates of the amount of money lost because of that access denial are the real measures of the cost of not providing OA. Neither journal prices nor journal subsidies are measures of that real, preventable loss to research progress and productivity.

J-CG: "Every sample examined so far, outside the US, UK and Australia, shows levels of subsidies that go from significant to almost total. Why play skeptical on this issue? "

I am still skeptical because my question about proportion of journals subsidised was not about what proportion of a country's national journals are subsidised, but about what percentage of that country's research output is published in subsidised journals (by discipline -- and, to get an even better idea: by quality-bracket).

J-CG: "Side by side, mandating self-archiving and pushing, perhaps even mandating, the conversion of subsidized journals to OA would help reach OA faster."

In my opinion, complicating and handicapping the (still not yet adopted) self-archiving mandate proposals with journal-conversion mandates at this time would make it harder, not easier, to get the self-archiving mandates adopted at all -- especially because it would couple mandates with funding commitments. Moreover, until the question of the true proportion of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (by discipline, as well as their standing in the quality hierarchy) is answered, it is not even clear what marginal gains in OA are to be expected from trying to convert subsidised journals to OA.

There is nothing wrong with continuing efforts to convert non-OA journals into OA journals, including the subsidised non-OA journals, but I do not think this should be conflated or combined with the efforts to get the OA self-archiving mandates adopted. (And, to repeat, once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned. It reverts to just being a matter of the evolution of journal publishing: No more access/impact problem making it seem urgent -- though I do think that reaching 100% OA through self-archiving mandates is likely to accelerate journal reform too.)

J-CG: "Many journals of a "national" reach... tend not to appear in [Ulrich's or ISI]"

The question still stands: What percentage of those journals is subsidised?

And there is a second question: Would it help or handicap the prospects of adoption for OA self-archiving mandates to try to add subsidised-journal-conversion clauses to them? Mandates are adopted by research institutions and funders and applied to the research output of their employees and fundees. Subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would be addressed to an entirely different constituency. Moreover, OA self-archiving mandates would already cover all the contents of all journals, subsidised or unsubsidised.

J-CG: "in the social sciences and the humanities... top-down distinctions are much more difficult to establish."

No doubt. But the percentage of research output in subsidised journals should be much less difficult (than that) to establish.

J-CG: "how does one determine if a Finnish journal on Finnish literature, published in Finnish, is inferior or superior to a Dutch journal on Dutch literature, written in Dutch?"

No need to compare Finnish journals to Dutch journals. Just Finnish research output in subsidised journals to total Finnish research output. (If there is a way to estimate relative quality, that would be helpful too, as would separate tallies by discipline.)

J-CG: "If impact factors do not work well as tools to rank journals, how does one go about deciding what is top and what is down?"

There are other ways to rank journals, but point taken: Where quality ranking is unavailable, percentage of research published in subsidised journals, by discipline, without a quality estimate, will do.

J-CG: "in each discipline... the pecking order is there, but... not always clearly visible [from] SCI or Ulrich's."

Then use the pecking order, not SCI, to estimate the relative quality of subsidised and unsubsidised journals. (Ulrich's does not rank.)

J-CG: "Stevan's disbelief in the significant reality of subsidized scholarly journals..."

It seems reasonable to ask for percentages, by discipline, in order to weigh the significance of this reality.

J-CG: "In the debates with opponents to OA... estimates of lost money because of access denial... [have] never gained much traction..."

The traction of the access/impact argument is not meant to be with the opponents of OA, but with the beneficiaries of OA (and of access/impact), namely, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders (for the sake of research usage/impact, productivity, progress).

The potential mandator of OA self-archiving is the research community itself -- research funders and institutions -- not the publishers who oppose OA.

Lost subscription money is a matter of concern to publishers, and shortage of subscription money is a matter of concern to librarians, but the former are unwilling and the latter unable to mandate either OA self-archiving or conversion to OA publishing.

Hence the traction for OA needs to be with research institutions and funders. Any potential traction from subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would depend entirely on the percentage of subsidised journals and the willingness of the subsidisers to mandate conversion. (But if access/impact loss had no traction with subsidisers, what would have traction? Why is subsidising non-OA journals bad, if not because of access/impact loss? "Monetising" access/impact loss is merely estimating how bad that access/impact loss is.)

J-CG: "These are two different, parallel strategies. The whole of the BOAI document was also very clear on this point."

BOAI was about OA, not about OA mandates. We've come a long way since December 2001...

SH: "once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned."

J-CG: "One could argue symmetrically that once all journals have turned OA, self-archiving is moot insofar as OA is concerned. So where does that leave us?"

It leaves us with one route (green) to 100% OA (self-archiving) that depends only on the research community itself -- the research providers and users, their institutions and funders -- and that can be 100% mandated.

And another route (gold) that depends on converting journals, hence on journal publishers, most of whom are not so inclined; and if conversion is mandatable at all, it is mandatable only for the subsidised journals, whose percentage and distribution in the quality hierarchy is not known (but unlikely to be very high).

In other words, one route (green) that, once mandated, is certain to deliver 100% OA, and another route (gold) that, even it can be mandated for some unknown percentage of journals, is likely to leave us waiting for 100% OA for a long, long time to come.

I'd go with the sure road.

Many thanks to Kimmo Kuusela for the prompt provision of data on Finland's research output, by discipline!

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Kimmo Kuusela wrote:
"I have compared Finnish research output in Finnish subsidised journals (that is, practically all Finnish journals) to total Finnish research output in 2005.
The results:
16% (2100) of the total number of articles (12839) in refereed journals were published in Finnish journals.
By field of education: Theology 5 %
The Humanities 49%
Art and Design 64%
Music 44%
Theatre and Dance 43%
Education 45%
Sport Sciences 0%
Social Sciences 47%
Psychology 16%
Health Sciences 31%
Law 77%
Economics 21%
Natural sciences 6%
Agriculture and Forestry 14%
Engineering 8%
Medicine 11%
Dentistry 18%
Veterinary Medicine 2%
Pharmacy 13%
Fine Arts 100%
Field of education unspecified 15% Here's a handy tool for even more calculations."

On the question of whether the proportion of national research output published in subsidised national journals is closer to 5% or 50%, the answer for Finland overall is closer to 5%; but looked at by discipline, for arts, humanities and social sciences it is closer to 50%. (The overall average is presumably 16% because of the lower relative proportion of articles in the arts, humanities and social sciences.)

"[T]he relative weight of each discipline in the category of refereed journal articles was as follows: Theology 0%
The Humanities 5%
Art and Design 0%
Music 0%
Theatre and Dance 0%
Education 3%
Sport Sciences 0%
Social Sciences 5%
Psychology 2%
Health Sciences 2%
Law 1%
Economics 4%
Natural sciences 21%
Agriculture and Forestry 2%
Engineering 13%
Medicine 31%
Dentistry 2%
Veterinary Medicine 1%
Pharmacy 1%
Fine Arts 0%
Field of education unspecified 5%The total output in 2005 was 24847 items, of which 7642 items (31%) were published domestically. Total output includes refereed articles, articles in compiled works or in printed conference publications, monographs (theses and dissertations excluded), and articles in universities' own serials (departmental serials excluded)."

On the basis of these data, if I were a Finnish researcher, institution or funder, I would hope that (1) all Finnish researchers would be required by their funders and institutions to self-archive all their refereed journal articles and that (2) all subsidised Finnish journals would be required by their subsiders to make their online editions open access.

I don't think trying to combine (1) and (2) into a single mandate would make much sense, since not only would the requirees -- researchers in (1), publishers in (2) -- not be the same in the two cases, but it is not even clear that the requirers -- research institutions and funders in (1), journal subsidisers in (2) -- would be the same either.

Hence it would be best if the two were pursued separately, in parallel. It is also worth noting that (1) would already moot (2), since 100% OA self-archiving would include the OA self-archiving of the subsidised 16% too! But I agree with Jean-Claude Guedon that this is no reason not to pursue the subsidised option (2) in parallel: just don't wrap (2) into (1) (at least not until (1) is adopted!).

It would be splendid if we could see data from other countries (along with their discipline data) along the lines Kimmo Kuusela has provided for Finland. (Arthur Sale has already made a stab for Australia, though I'll bet there are a few subsidised journals still lurking in the Aussie outback somewhere, possibly in the arts?)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: The new Director General of France's large, distributed national research network, the CNRS, has reiterated his predecessor's recommendation to all CNRS researchers to deposit their articles in HAL, the CNRS's nationwide institutional repository. Unfortunately, recommendations alone do not generate much more Open Access self-archiving than the spontaneous worldwide baseline of about 15%. To accelerate CNRS self-archiving toward 100%, the recommendation must be transformed into a requirement. The only obstacle to adopting an OA self-archiving requirement is the perception that it could contravene copyright agreements with publishers, so the simple, certain solution is to make it an immediate deposit requirement (no exceptions, no delays), with Open-Access-setting merely a recommendation rather than a requirement. (For the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval, the semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT request feature of the institutional repository softwares can provide for all would-be users' access needs during the embargo.)

---

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Thierry Chanier wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

"Arnold Migus, the new head of the CNRS recommends depositing in HAL"

Recommending has been demonstrated to be insufficient to generate self-archiving above the worldwide spontaneous self-archiving baseline of 15%: Only requiring (a mandate, directive, compulsory policy) will generate self-archiving that approaches 100% of institutional research output.

Moreover, this CNRS recommendation is not new. It was already registered in ROARMAP on 17 Mar 2005 under the former CNRS Directorate by the former Head of Scientific and Technical Information (Laurent Romary)

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

"HAL (Hyper Article en Ligne), is an open archive that already covers the fields of Physics, Mathematics and Humanities within CNRS and which is our software platform for our future institutional archive. The CNRS intends to establish an institutional archive -- a high quality and wide coverage repository of its research publication output. It is expected that the adoption of a highly incentivized institutional self-archiving policy for our researchers will ensure that the majority of CNRS publications deposited in the archive will also be made externally visible in Open Access."

From the growth data for HAL, the deposit rate does not seem commensurate with all of CNRS's annual research output. If you consult by year of publication you will find that from the totatlity of the country's CNRS research units, there are, respectively, only 4430, 5462, and 2110 articles for 2004, 2005, and 2006, respectively.

It would be very helpful to know what percentage of CNRS's total annual research output this represents, and how it distributes across CNRS's many fields and research units.

"the researcher should [first] ask the publisher for permission to deposit."

This is a big mistake. No permission is required from anyone merely to deposit.

The CNRS policy should be a requirement to deposit all published articles (full text and metadata) immediately upon acceptance for publication (no exceptions, no delays). The only optional component should concern when the access to the deposited full-text is set as Open Access. (Until then the deposited full-text is in Closed Access, but its metadata are already accessible webwide.) Setting full-text access immediately to Open Access should be recommended, but not required (for the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval), in order to avoid further delay in adopting the policy, and in order to rule out all exceptions or delays in depositing).

"They suggest spending time to negotiate with the publisher when signing the copyright statement, even asking him the permission to deposit the preprint!"

Nonsense. All deposits should be immediate; negotiation can come afterwards, if the author wishes, in order to decide when to set access to OA for the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval. In the interim, I would strongly urge that HAL implements the semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT request feature of EPrints (now also implemented in DSpace).

Authors need no permission at all from anyone, however, to immediately set access to 100% of their unrefereed preprints to Open Access at the moment of deposit (which can be done even before the preprint is submitted to any journal for refereeing!) -- but the decision about whether or not to deposit an unrefereed preprint at all must be left entirely to the author: encouraged but not required.

"Hence if the publisher is against any form of deposit, the researcher should do nothing."

Nonsense. Deposit should be de-coupled from access-setting. Postprint deposit should be mandatory and immediate, and with no exceptions. Access-setting should be left up to the author, with immediate OA strongly encouraged, but not required. For preprints, deposit itself should only be encouraged but not required -- but access to deposited preprints can always be set as OA immediately.

"I do not that know any French publisher appears on the Sherpa list. They avoided responding and taking any official position. Informally they are against We could consider this text as an invitation to open the debate with them"

Please, before debating: deposit!

" - there is no statement that research funded with public money should in any case be made open access"

It would be a good idea for French research funders to follow the example of other research funders worldwide, including the European Commission, the UK and the US, in requiring that the results of publicly funded research be made be deposited immediately -- and made Open Access as soon as possible.

" - there is no requirement in French research contracts, when claiming funds to deposit the resulting publications in an OA repository [like HAL]"

There is alas no requirement in any other country's research contracts yet either! The EC, UK and US have so far only proposed to require self-archiving: they have not yet implemented their respective proposals. So far, only the Wellcome Trust, a private funder, plus 6 individual universities and research institutions worldwide, have actually implemented a self-archiving mandate. So there is still time for France to become the first...

" - [in any case] it is nonsense to ask the publisher for the right to deposit a preprint, the preprint not being part of any copyright statement"

Correct. But it is also nonsense to ask the publisher for permission to deposit any article: If the publisher's policy is relevant to anything at all, it is relevant only to access-setting, not to depositing.

" - it is contrary to our current position to deposit first and then consider whether the deposit can be made free immediately or after a given delay."

Then please change your current position, which is arbitrary, counterproductive, and has obvious not been thought through.

"What do you think of this position? Will it promote or hamper the development of OA?"

Recommending self-archiving is better than not recommending self-archiving, but it is not enough. What is needed is requiring (i.e., a self-archiving directive or mandate). And the mandate should be an immediate-deposit mandate. Any delay and negotiation should only pertain to the date of Open-Access-setting, not to the date of deposit (which should be on the day of acceptance of the refereed, revised, final draft for publication)...

The failure to distinguish deposit from release, the failure to mandate immediate deposit, and the bad advice on copyright and negotiation would hamper rather than promote OA. But fortunately this is all very easy to correct. All that is required is to understand exactly how and why to correct it -- and then to correct it.

Stevan Harnad

---

A l'attention de Mesdames et Messieurs les directeurs d'unité Sous-couvert de Mesdames et Messieurs les délégués régionaux Objet : Développement des archives ouvertes

Chère Collègue, Cher Collègue,

Le CNRS soutient le mouvement international en faveur des archives ouvertes. Il a, à cet égard, exprimé une position de principe lors de la déclaration de Berlin, signée le 22 octobre 2003, en faveur du modèle du libre accès à la connaissance. Et l'établissement a agi concrètement en mettant en oeuvre la base pluridisciplinaire Hal hébergée au Centre pour la communication scientifique directe (CCSD), unité propre de service (UPS) du CNRS. L'Académie des sciences a exprimé, pour sa part, son fort soutien dans un avis rendu le 5 juillet 2005 et un accord inter-établissements (établissements d'enseignement supérieur et de recherche et organismes de recherche) est en cours de signature pour l'utilisation commune de Hal.

Dans ce contexte, je souhaite que vous invitiez tous les chercheurs des unités propres ou associées au CNRS à déposer, chaque fois que c'est possible, les manuscrits de leurs travaux sur la base Hal, les rendant ainsi librement consultables par la communauté scientifique internationale. Outre une large visibilité immédiate des travaux de recherche, ce dispositif permettra, dans un cadre académique, une préservation à long terme des documents sous forme électronique. Il permettra également aux laboratoires et institutions une identification facilitée de leur production scientifique via une collection constituée sur la base Hal.

Je vous incite donc à prendre des mesures pour que ce dépôt soit effectué régulièrement. Le CNRS veillera, pour sa part, au maintien de ces bases en libre accès, à la conservation à long terme du corpus de connaissances ainsi constitué et à la stabilité des adresses des documents mis en ligne. Il ne s'agit évidemment pas de renoncer à la publication des travaux de recherche dans des revues à comité de lecture. L'évaluation scientifique par les pairs et l'amélioration des textes soumis aux revues scientifiques, en particulier internationales, sont des composantes essentielles de la recherche. Cependant, comme l'ont déjà montré certaines grandes communautés scientifiques, une publication par les canaux classiques n'est pas incompatible avec la communication des résultats sur une base en accès libre.

Il existe bien évidemment des cas oû il est inopportun ou impossible de diffuser les résultats de recherche, que ce soit dans le cadre des bases en libre accès ou des publications traditionnelles. C'est aux chercheurs et aux laboratoires d'appliquer le discernement nécessaire.

Il convient en particulier de veiller à ne pas rendre publics des résultats confidentiels, par exemple s'ils sont destinés à être brevetés, et de vérifier que les droits de diffusion en archives ouvertes n'ont fait pas l'objet d'une cession à un éditeur (cf. le guide du dépôt et du bon usage de Hal qui rappelle les règles à respecter en matière de droit de propriété

Les chercheurs des laboratoires propres ou associés au CNRS sont invités à ce titre à favoriser les revues et éditeurs dont les contrats sont compatibles avec le dépôt des documents sur Hal, mais bien évidemment ce sont eux les mieux placés pour décider en dernier ressort si cela est possible, compte tenu des habitudes dans chaque discipline et de la nécessité d'une bon ne diffusion.

Dans les cas oû il s'avère que le dépôt du texte dans son intégralité n'est pas approprié, il demeure toujours la possibilité de déposer dans Hal une notice bibliographique ne contenant que les références de publication. Sachant pouvoir compter sur votre actif concours pour contribuer à développer le modèle du libre accès à la connaissance, je vous prie de bien vouloir agréer, Chère Collègue, Cher Collègue, l'expression de mes salutations les meilleures,

Arnold Migus, Directeur Général du CNRS

---

SUMMARY: Larry Hurtado (Divinity, Edinburgh) suggests that a metrics-based alternative to the panel-based UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) may not be appropriate for some disciplines because their research is not journal-article-based, and hence citation-impact metrics are not valid. I reply that all disciplines have research output, and its usage and impact can be objectively measured. For example, book citation-impact can be measured too, if authors deposit their books' reference lists in their institutional repositories. Moreover, the RAE is just one of the two components of the UK dual research funding system. The other, far larger component, continues to be individual research proposal funding, adjudicated by peer review. Metrics are merely a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- peer review, but published articles and books have already been peer reviewed, hence there is no need for RAE panels to try to repeat the exercise.

---

On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, Larry Hurtado, Department of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

LH: "Stevan Harnad is totally in favour of a "metrics based" approach to judging research merit with a view toward funding decisions, and greets the news of such a shift from past/present RAE procedure with unalloyed joy."

No, metrics are definitely not meant to serve as the basis for all or most research funding decisions: research proposals, as noted, are assessed by peer review.

Metrics is intended for the other component in the UK dual funding system, in which, in addition to directly funded research, based on competitive peer review of research bids, there is also a smaller, secondary (but prestigious) top-slicing system, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It is the RAE that needed to be converted to metrics from the absurd, wasteful and costly juggernaut that it used to be.

LH: "Well, hmmm. I'm not so sure (at least not yet). Perhaps there is more immediate reason for such joy in those disciplines that already rely heavily on a metrics approach to making decisions about researchers."

No discipline uses metrics systematically yet; moreover, many metrics are still to be designed and tested. However, the only thing "metrics" really means is: the objective measurement of quantifiable performance indicators. Surely all disciplines have measurable performance indicators. Surely it is not true of any discipline that the only way, or the best way, to assess all of its annual research output is by having each piece individually re-reviewed after it has already been peer-reviewed twice -- before execution, by a funding council's peer-reviewers as a research proposal, and after execution, by a journal's referees as a research publication.

LH: "In the sciences, and also now social sciences, there are citation-services that count publications and citations thereof in a given list of journals deemed the "canon"of publication venues for a given discipline. And in these disciplines journal articles are deemed the main (perhaps sole) mode of research publication. Ok. Maybe it'll work for these chaps."

First, with an Open Access database, there need be no separate "canon": articles in any of the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals and congresses can count -- though some will (rightly) count for more than others, based on the established and known quality standards and impact of the journal in which it appeared (this too can be given a metric weight). Alongside the weighted impact factor of the journal, there will be the citation counts for each article itself, its author, the co-citations in and out, the download counts, the hub/authority weights, the endogamy/exogamy weights. etc. etc.

All these metrics (and many more) will be derivable for all disciplines from an Open Access database (no longer just restricted to ISI's Web of Knowledge).

That includes, by the way, citations of books by journal articles -- and also citations of books and journal articles by books, because although most book authors may not wish to make their books' full-texts OA, they can and should certainly make their books' bibliographic metadata, including their bibliography of cited references, OA. Those book-impact metrics can then be added to the metric harvest, citation-linked, counted, and duly weighted, along with all the other metrics.

There are even Closed-Access ways of self-archiving books' digital full-texts (such as google book search) so they can be processed for semiometric analysis (endogamy/exogamy, content overlap, proximity, lineage, chronometric trends) by harvesters that do not make the full text available openly. All disciplines can benefit from this.

LH: "But I'd like to know how it will work in Humanities fields such as mine. Some questions, for Stevan or whomever. First, to my knowledge, there is no such citation-count service in place. So, will the govt now fund one to be set up for us? Or how will the metrics be compiled for us? I.e., there simply is no mechanism in place for doing "metrics"for Humanities disciplines."

All the government needs to do is to mandate the self-archiving of all UK research output in each researcher's own OAI-compliant institutional (or central) repository. (The US and the rest of Europe will shortly follow suit, once the prototype policy model is at long last adopted by a major player!) The resulting worldwide interoperable database will be the source of all the metric data, and a new generation of scientometric and semiometric harvesters and analysers will quickly be spawned to operate on it, to mine it to extract the rich new generation of metrics.

There is absolutely nothing exceptional about the humanities (as long as book bibliographies are self-archived too, alongside journal-article full-texts). Research uptake and usage is a generic indicator of research performance, and citations and downloads are generic indicators of research uptake and usage. The humanities are no different in this regard. Moreover, inasmuch as OA also enhances research uptake and usage itself, the humanities stand to benefit from OA, exactly like the other disciplines.

LH: "Second, for us, journal articles are only one, and usually not deemed the primary/preferred, mode of research publication. Books still count quite heavily. So, if we want to count citations, will some to-be-imagined citation-counting service/agency comb through all the books in my field as well as the journal articles to count how many of my publications get cited and how often? If not, then the "metrics"will be so heavily flawed as to be completing misleading and useless."

All you need to do is self-archive your books' metadata and cited reference lists and all your journal articles in your OAI-compliant Institutional repository. The scientometric search engines -- like citebase, citeseer, google scholar, and more to come -- will take care of all the rest. If you want to do even better, scan in, OCR and self-archive the legacy literature too (the journal articles plus the metadata and cited reference lists of books of yore too; if you're worried about variations in reference citing styles: don't worry! Just get the digital texts in and algorithms can start sorting them out and improving themselves).

LH: "Third, in many sciences, esp. natural and medical sciences, research simply can't be conducted without significant external funding. But in many/most Humanities disciplines truly groundbreaking and highly influential research continues to be done without much external funding."

So what is your point? That the authors of unfunded research, uncoerced by any self-archiving mandate, will not self-archive? Don't worry. They will. They may not be the first ones, but they will follow soon afterwards, as the power and potential of self-archiving to measure as well as to accelerate and increase research impact and progress become more and more manifest.

LH: "(Moreover, no govt has yet seen fit to provide funding for the Humanities constituency of researchers commensurate with that available for Sciences. So, it's a good thing we don't have to depend on such funding!)"

Funding grumbles are a worthy topic, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with OA and the benefits of self-archiving, or metrics.

LH: "My point is that the "metrics"for the Humanities will have to be quite a bit different in what is counted, at the very least."

No doubt. And the metrics used, and their weights, will be adjusted accordingly. But metrics they will be. No exceptions there. And no regression back to either human re-evaluation or delphic oracles: Objective, countable performance indicators (for the bulk research output: of course for special prizes and honours individual human judgment will have to be re-invoked, in order to compare like with like, individually).

LH: "Fourth, I'm not convinced (again, not yet; but I'm open to persuasion) that counting things = research quality and impact. Example: A number of years ago, coming from a tenure meeting at my previous University I ran into a colleague in Sociology. He opined that it was unnecessary to labour over tenure, and that he needed only two pieces of information: number of publications and number of citations. I responded, "I have two words for you: Pons and Fleischman". Remember these guys? They were cited in Time and Newsweek and everywhere else for a season as discovers of "cold fusion". And over the next couple of years, as some 50 or so labs tried unsuccessfully to replicate their alleged results, they must have been among the most frequently-cited guys in the business. And the net effect of all that citation was to discredit their work. So, citation = "impact". Well, maybe, but in this case "impact"= negative impact. So, are we really so sure of "metrics"?"

Not only do citations have to be weighted, as they can and will be, recursively, by the weight of their source (Proceedings of the Royal Society vs. The Daily Sun, citations from Nobel Laureates vs citations from uncited authors), but semiometric algorithms will even begin to have a go at sorting positive citations from negative ones, disinterested ones from endogamous ones, etc. Are you proposing to defer to individual expert opinion in some (many? most? all?) cases, rather than using a growing wealth and diversity of objective performance indicators? Do you really think it is harder to find individual cases of subjective opinion going wrong than objective metrics going wrong?

LH: "Perhaps, however, Stevan can help me see the light, and join him in acclaiming the advent of metrics."

I suggest that the best way to see the light on the subjective of Open Access Digitometrics is to start self-archiving and sampling the (few) existing digitometric engines, such as citebase. You might also wish to have a look at the chapter I recommended (no need to buy the book: it's OA: Just click!):

Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 21. Chandos.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: The publisher lobby can defeat the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) (to mandate self-archiving of all federally funded research so as to make it freely accessible online) if FRPAA is promoted merely or mainly as a means of providing public (student, practitioner, patient, general public) access to publicly funded research. Publishers can and will argue (and already are arguing) that the public does not really want or need access to most of this specialized peer-reviewed journal literature, across all fields (not just clinically relevant medicine), written by and for specialized researchers, and that it is hence not justified to put publishers' subscription revenues at potential risk by mandating that this entire literature must be made freely accessible online. Instead, publishers will propose special arrangements in which they themselves would make the tiny fraction of what they publish that is of potential public interest freely accessible online. The right response to this by FRPAA proponents is to make it very explicit that the primary purpose of the bill is not public READS, but "CURES" -- i.e., the public benefits that come from applying and building upon research findings in further research and practical applications, for the sake of which the research was publicly funded in the first place. And CURES come from researcher access and usage -- researchers applying and building upon current research in further research and applications -- not from public access and usage. Because no researcher can currently afford access to anywhere near all the research they might need to read and use, researcher self-archiving substantially accelerates and increases research usage and impact, which is the measure of speed and progress toward CURES. And substantially accelerating and increasing progress toward CURES -- unlike providing public READS -- does outweigh any hypothetical risk to publisher revenues (although there is as yet absolutely no evidence that self-archiving reduces subscription revenues.) Moreover, with free online access (Open Access) to self-archived research, the public (students, practitioners, patients, tax-payers) get full access too, as a secondary benefit, but not because that is the primary benefit from or justification for mandating Open Access self-archiving.

---

ANON: " Your arguments are totally logical. However, a factor you are not taking into account: if researchers are focused on their research- impact - politicians are focused on their own image and reelection potential. It is the politicians who need to vote in FRPAA."

And it is the publisher lobby that will be pressuring them not to. SPPP (Student/Practitioner/Patient/Public) access is a good intro, to get the politicians' and voters' attention, but then you need a follow-through that can hold up against the publisher lobby -- and SPPP-access has no follow-through when publishers inevitably say, as they will (and are already):

"You want to mandate that our business revenue should be put at risk for the sake of SPPP-access, yet there is no evidence that the SPPP reads (or has the slightest wish to read) most of the highly specialized research that we publish! Why not just make a side-deal that we make publicly accessible that tiny fraction of (mostly clinical-medical) research that is likely to be of SPPP interest, and leave the rest of it -- which is the overwhelming majority of it -- alone, rather than putting all of our revenues at risk for no objective reason?

(And denigrate logic all you like, in the end, the pro-mandate argument has to make sense, otherwise the publisher lobby wins and the OA self-archiving mandate -- and the best interests of research and the public that funds it -- lose.)

The requisite follow-through is CURES, not SPPP-access. Students, practitioners, patients and the public do not produce CURES, researchers do. And the reason researcher usage and impact is so important is not because it produces money and prizes for researchers, but because it generates CURES. In fact, that is what research is funded for, not to produce reading matter for the SPPP.

("CURES" is of course over-simplified too, and medically biassed, but it will do, as long as it is put in scare-quotes or CAPs: more generally, it means applications of research, including technology; even more generally, it means pure research progress itself, which might eventually lead to applications; and when it comes to social science and especially the humanities, which rarely has any applications at all, it means the production of specialized scholarship, which we presumably fund because we think it is a social benefit to promote scholarship, not because the general public or even students actually need or wish to read the peer-reviewed journal articles reporting the research the public funds, written by specialists for specialists, but because the public wants to promote scholarly progress, which may eventually trickle down into education.)

ANON: " Is there evidence that FRPAA will result in the kind of citations that politicians care about - photo ops and positive pieces in the news, funding support and votes so that they can be re-elected?"

CURES produce photo-ops, and for researchers to produce CURES, researchers (not SPPP) need to have access to the ongoing research, in order to use it and build on it.

Moreover, the politicians are not just responsive to votes, as you know, but also to money and lobbying, especially from big business, and to what fosters or threatens business revenue flows. Yes, "public access to publicly funded research" sounds like a good vote-getter on the surface, even if it doesn't amount to much research the public would actually want to access and. But the publishing lobby is another matter, and they are the ones to contend with now.

It's not the vote-getting power of the OA principle that has been blocking the RCUK policy for two years and that has watered down the ,a href="http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm">NIH public access policy to near-nothingness: it's the publisher lobby; and this time FRPAA has to come forearmed: If it tries to coast on the public-access-to-publicly-funded-research slogan alone, or primarily, it will be defeated, no matter how sexy it may sound as a vote-getter. (And, by the way, most individual citizens don't read research and couldn't care less about this issue, one way or the other.)

Publishers will float doomsday scenarios about ruinous risks to their ability to make ends meet if self-archiving is mandated (not based on any evidence, but sounding ominous just the same). These doomsday scenarios need a more convincing answer than that "we are doing it so the public can read the research it funds" -- because then the publishers will simply adduce the abundant evidence that the public is not reading most of the peer-reviewed research they publish, and would not and could not have the slightest interest in ever reading it. So the revenue-risk is completely unjustified.

Not so if the rationale is CURES rather than SPPP READS, for research progress and the possibility of cures is the very reason we fund research in the first place. CURES -- but not READS -- offset publishers' hypothetical doomsday scenario very effectively.

ANON: " To put it another way: is there research showing that politicians care about researcher-impact at all, never mind enough to stand up to the publisher anti-OA lobbying?"

Politicians care about CURES, and "cures" is the simple (simplistic) encapsulation of research uptake, usage, application, productivity and progress. And that in turn is something that can only come from researchers using and applying research, not from the public, reading research. And it is for CURES that the public is funding research in the first place, not for its own READing delectation.

So the right public issue politicians need to focus on is CURES, not SPPP-access; and CURES means research usage and impact, which comes from researcher-use, not from SPPP-reading.

ANON: " Arguments focussed on students, patients, and the public are much more likely to persuade politicians than arguments based exclusively on benefits for researchers. The two streams of arguments complement each other. It is not necessary, or desirable, to limit pro-OA arguments."

OA is not about benefits to researchers! It is about CURES. Researcher access means more progress and momentum toward CURES.

Moreover, it is now no longer just about persuading politicians but about resisting the publisher lobby, which is trying to dissuade politicians. Answers to their objections are needed too; and SPPP-access is not the answer, CURES is; and that means researcher-access, not SPPP-access. (Yet, let us not forget, SPPP-access can and will come too, with the OA territory: So it's fine to mention both benefits, but essential to make it clear that CURES is the primary rationale for mandating self-archiving, and READS merely a secondary benefit.

ANON: " The politician who cares about patients but thinks the researcher-arguments are abstract, will support a patient-based OA argument. It is unlikely that a person with this viewpoint would support a research-only focused argument."

The focus is on CURES, not on abstract researcher-arguments: Everyone knows that CURES come from researchers, not from students, practitioners, patients or the general public. I think that is a concrete matter that politicians and voters are quite capable of understanding. And it has the virtue of trumping the publishers' arguments about hypothetical revenue risks: progress toward actual CURES (monitored in the form of research impact) trumps hypothetical revenue risks; SPPP-READS do not.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum