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Tuesday, June 13. 2006

Student/Practitioner/Patient/Public (SPPP) Access Comes With the OA Territory

SUMMARY: "Public Access to Publicly Funded Research" is a good way to draw voter and elected-official attention to the need for Open Access, but then it has to be made clear that research is publicly funded primarily for the sake of the benefits it brings to the public: so its findings can be used and built upon in the form of further research progress and applications ("CURES") and not primarily because the public has a great desire or need to read peer-reviewed research articles ("READS"), written by and for researchers (and research students). Hence it is primarily for the sake of making publicly funded research accessible to its intended users -- researchers -- that Open Access is so important and urgent for the public that funds it: because, right now, researchers do not have access to all or most of the research they need in order to maximize research progress and applications (CURES), to the benefit of the public that funded the research. Public access READs, however, come as a secondary side-benefit of Open Access anyway (for everyone, including students, practitioners and patients); yet the reason it is so important not to argue that public READs are the primary rationale for Open Access is that that rationale can be challenged (and perhaps even defeated) by the publisher lobby, arguing that it is unjustified to put their subscription revenues at potential risk by mandating author self-archiving (even though there exists no objective evidence that author self-archiving causes subscription decline) merely for the sake of public READS when the public (including students, practitioners and patients) in fact has little interest in reading peer-reviewed research journal articles apart from a minority of health-relevant articles, for which the publishers can instead make special arrangements to make them -- and only them -- Open Access. In contrast, the true primary rationale for Open Access, "CURES" (i.e., research progress and applications) for the public that funded the research, does over-ride hypothetical risks to publisher subscription revenue (for which no actual evidence even exists).

Below is a reply to an anonymized query on an often-confused issue concerning Open Access (OA), the rationale for providing OA, and the rationale for mandating the provision of OA (by mandating self-archiving, as the RCUK in the UK, the FRPAA in the US and the European Commission (EC) are each proposing to do):

(1) OA is about Open Access to research: about 2.5 million articles per year, published in about 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals and congress proceedings in all disciplines, from maths, physics and engineering to biology and medical sciences, to the social sciences and the humanities.

(2) The only ones who can provide access to these 2.5 million annual researchers articles are their authors, the researchers: either by publishing them in an OA journal, or by publishing them in a conventional journal and also self-archiving them in their institutional repository (or a central one).

(3) Author surveys have shown that although only about 15% of authors self-archive spontaneously, 95% will comply if mandated to self-archive by their research funders and/or their institutions. The half-dozen self-archiving mandates that have already been adopted (including those of the Wellcome Trust, CERN, and several universities) have since confirmed this high compliance rate.

(4) The FRPAA, RCUK and EU mandate proposals are facing stout opposition from the publisher lobby, even though 94% of journals have already given their green light for immediate author self-archiving.

(5) The two main bases for the publishers' objections are that OA is unnecessary and that mandating self-archiving would put their subscription revenues at risk.

(6) There is to date no evidence at all that self-archiving reduces publisher subscription revenues, but even if it were ever to do so, the question is whether the benefits (to research, researchers, and the public that funds them) outweigh the risks (to publishers).

(7) The chief evidence that the benefits (to research, researchers, and the public that funds them) outweigh the risks (to publishers) is that OA substantially accelerates and increases research usage and impact, hence research progress and productivity (as measured by download and citation counts): This is the primary motivation for mandating the provision of OA, through self-archiving: to maximize research usage and impact, hence research productivity and progress ("CURES").

(8) A side-benefit is that OA increases access and usage for practitioners, patients and the general public too -- in those fields in which there is practitioner, patient, and public (PPP) interest in the research articles. (It has to be noted, though, that there is as yet no systematic quantitative measure of this PPP interest and that PPP interest is almost certainly limited to only a small fraction of the annual 2.5 million articles published across all research fields.)

(9) Hence the primary rationale for mandating OA self-archiving has to be the objectively measurable and demonstrated benefits it provides for research, researchers, and the public that funds them -- in terms of usage and citations as measures of progress toward CURES -- rather than merely PPP interest.

(10) OA of course also provides access for PPP use, but the important strategic point to understand is that PPP-needs (being limited to only a fraction of the OA fields and being difficult as yet to measure and document) cannot be adduced as the primary reason for putting publisher subscription revenues at even hypothetical risk -- otherwise there is a strong actual risk that the proposals to mandate self-archiving will be successfully defeated by the publisher lobby. The rationale for OA is primarily to provide access to research by researchers for researchers -- all for the benefit of the public that funded the research. PPP access is merely a side-benefit of OA. It would come nowhere near justifying an OA mandate just on its own.

Here is my detailed reply to a well-meaning (anonymous) query concerning PPP interests:

ANON: " When I read your 8-point agenda I believe that the clinical faculty would feel that they were not being embraced in it."

I think you are not quite understanding the OA problem, hence its solution: The objective is to provide free online access (OA) for all would-be users (whether they be researchers or practitioners, patients and public [PPP]).

The problem, however, is that the providers of the research, namely, the researchers who wrote the research articles, are not yet providing OA to their articles spontaneously.

The solution is to mandate that they must provide OA, for the benefit of the public that funds their research -- by self-archiving their own final, refereed, accepted drafts of their own articles free online in institutional or central repositories.

In order to get that solution (mandate) adopted, it is necessary to persuade those who are in a position to mandate self-archiving -- namely the researchers' own funders and institutions -- to mandate it. In order to persuade them to mandate it, it is necessary to persuade them that there is a need to mandate OA -- especially because the publishers are trying to prevent self-archiving mandates, or, failing that, to embargo them, because they fear they could reduce their subscription revenues (even though there is no evidence of this, even after 15 years of self-archiving, some of it at or near 100% for years now in some subfields).

Now comes the critical point: To persuade researchers and their funders and employers that there is indeed a strong need to mandate self-archiving despite the publishers' objections that there is no need for OA and that it might put their subscription revenues at risk, you have to make it clear exactly what the need for OA is, and how and why it is to researchers' advantage to self-archive their research:

The chief need for OA is on the part of those who are in the position to use and apply the research, for the benefit of the public that funded it, namely, the researchers by and for whom the research articles were written. And the objective measure of their need is download and citation counts: It has been demonstrated that self-archiving accelerates and increases downloads and citations substantially (meaning that without it, many potential users are denied access). Citation counts mean salary and funding for researchers, and overheads for their institutions, and both citations and downloads mean a return on the funder's investment of tax-payer money in funding the research, in terms of research productivity, applications and progress ("CURES"), in all fields.

So the way to solve the problem of how to persuade researchers to provide OA is to persuade funders and institutions to mandate self-archiving. And the way to persuade them to mandate self-archiving is to persuade them that OA is to the advantage of research and researchers (and their institutions and funders and especially the tax-payers that fund the funders) because it both accelerates and increases research citations and downloads (i.e., research impact and progress: "CURES").

Downloads are not as yet being systematically measured and compiled (although they will be eventually), but citations are already being systematically measured and compiled -- and, moreover, they are correlated with downloads.

So the simple, straightforward argument for mandating self-archiving, the one that is immune to publishers' objections that OA is unneeded or that it might ruin their business, is that self-archiving is optimal for research progress itself ("CURES"), because it substantially increases research citations, which indicates that the research is being taken up, used, applied and built upon.

If we could add download counts to the argument, and downloads in particular by practitioners, patients and public (PPP), we would, but there are no such download counts yet, so we cannot add them directly and empirically to the usage/impact argument. It is not necessary, however, because free access for researchers also means free access for everyone else too, including PPP. So there is no need to adduce specific evidence that there is substantial PPP demand and need for access (especially because in most specialized fields there is unlikely to be!).

We cannot, however, say that the primary reason we need OA is because of PPP needs, because (1) we have no data on PPP use yet and (2) PPP use applies to only a small fraction of the research literature -- 2.5 million articles a year, across all fields, in 24,000 journals. Hence this is not a valid argument for OA self-archiving in general, and, if put up front as the main reason for seeking OA mandates, would lead to debate, delay and defeat after years of haggling, with publisher offers of "special deals," with the publishers making only a select subset of their articles OA -- those that might have some PPP interest -- rather than all articles, which would put all of the research journal needlessly at (hypothetical) risk, for no compelling reason.

That would be the PPP tail wagging the entire OA research dog: PPP needs are only a tiny (though important) subset of OA needs. And, more important, direct PPP access is definitely not the main way the public benefits from OA! Focussing primarily on PPP access is the wrong strategy for persuading researchers, their institutions and their funders of the need to mandate OA, even though PPP access does undeniably have superficial appeal with voters and politicians; in the end, on its own, or in the lead as the primary rationale for Open Access, PPP access would lead to debate, delay and defeat for a self-archiving mandate.

But using PPP access needs as the primary rationale for OA needs is not necessary. The solution is to put the irrefutable direct needs of researchers for research access (for the sake of the research and application benefits -- "CURES" -- it will provide for patients, practitioners, cures, the public) first, and note that OA will also provide PPP access as a side-benefit wherever wanted or needed.

It is ever so important not to weaken the case for OA -- the case that must be put to the researchers and their institutions and funders, across all fields -- by giving primacy to access by patients and practitioners. They will get access anyway. But they are not the research providers: Researchers are; and most of them don't do clinically relevant research; and even those who do are rewarded for their research impact, and not yet for their practical impact. (They will be rewarded for the latter after OA prevails, but not before, so that cannot be used to induce them or their institutions and funders to self-archive: research impact can, and it gives everyone else access too.)

I hope you understand these issues of logic and practicality better now: Only a small fraction of research is PPP-relevant, so the need for PPP access cannot be made the principle argument for OA or OA will lose.

Now some comments:

ANON: " I don't think that folks understand this distinction well. You and I do but researchers=lab to the more social sciences. We have a large health science program here and our faculty have "divisions" (i.e. research faculty versus clinical faculty). It is from these clinical faculty I have extended my appreciation of the problems in the field. When I read your 8-point agenda I believe that the clinical faculty would feel that they were not being embraced in it."

If the clinical faculty publish research (i.e., if they are OA providers), they are embraced by it. If they merely use research, they are irrelevant to a mandate that addresses research providers. However, since OA means OA for everyone, clinicians (indeed, all of PPP) are embraced by its outcome, which is Open Access to all the research they need.

Please distinguish what concerns research providers from what concerns research users. The OA problem is that of getting the providers to go ahead and provide the OA (and the solution is to mandate providing it). And the users are the beneficiaries (whether researchers, practitioners, patients, or the public). (Moreover, the public benefits incomparably more from the CURES than the READS). Please do not conflate the problem of getting access (the user problem) with the problem of getting providers to provide OA (the mandate problem). The solution to the mandate problem is also the provider solution to the user access problem.

ANON: "As we try to go about courting our disciplines I think that the language is important when we cross over to the professional/social sciences. There are few, if any, practitioners of particle physics. But there are lots of nurses, social workers, educators, and so on who could use the research but they are challenged to get it.... the situation is really grim... once students leave the school and move to "disconnected" areas of which there are many)."

You are mixing up the user problem and the provider problem here: The point is that providers have to be mandated to provide OA. You are also mixing up the (minority) practitioner-relevant OA fields with the vast majority of practitioner-irrelevant OA fields. OA and OA mandates need to cover them all, and the research impact argument is the decisive and universal one, not the practitioner argument, which is a minority special case, and could be strategically manipulated by publishers with special side-deals.

By the way, students could be added to PPP too, making it SPPP, and the same argument applies to them: OA gives them access along with the territory, and eventually their usage will be measured and credited too, through download counts. Moreover, to the extent that students are or become researchers, their usage also translates into citations and more research (and "CURES").

ANON: " I think that all that needs to be added is something along the lines of "research-practitioners benefit [from OA] too" and this is particular important to "isolated", "international" and "less-resourced" communities."

It's fine to add SPPP needs to research needs in the overall rationale for OA wherever possible (though I think it is already covered by "all would-be users"). Eventually, Connotea-style tagging will help quantify SPPP need and its benefits, the way it is already quantified by research citations...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 03:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, March 23. 2006

Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research Assessment

Future UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to be Metrics-Based
As predicted, and long urged, the UK's wasteful, time-consuming Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is to be replaced by metrics:

"Research exercise to be scrapped"
Donald MacLeod, Guardian Wednesday March 22, 2006

Science and innovation investment framework 2004-2014: next steps supporting UK Budget 2006
"The Government is strongly committed to the dual support system, and to rewarding research excellence, but recognises some of the burdens imposed by the existing Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The Government's firm presumption is that after the 2008 RAE the system for assessing research quality and allocating 'quality-related' (QR) funding will be mainly metrics-based... The Government will launch a consultation on its preferred option for a metrics-based system for assessing research quality and allocating QR funding, publishing results in time for the 2006 Pre-Budget Report."

"Over recent years a number of studies have considered options for a radically different allocation system for QR in order to avoid or reduce the need for a peer review process. The focus in most cases has been on identifying one or more metrics that could be used to assess research quality and allocate funding, for example research income, citations, publications, research student numbers etc. The Government has considered the evidence to date and favours identifying a simpler system that may not precisely replicate the level of detailed analysis of the RAE but would enable an appropriate distribution of QR funding at the institutional level."

"[M]etrics collected as part of the next assessment will be used to undertake an exercise shadowing the 2008 RAE itself, to provide a benchmark on the information value of the metrics as compared to the outcomes of the full peer review process. The aim of any changes following this exercise will be to reduce the administrative burden of peer review, wherever possible, consistent with the overriding aim of assessing excellence"

RAE outcome is most closely correlated (r = 0.98) with the metric of prior RCUK research funding (Figure 4.1) (this is no doubt in part a "Matthew Effect"), but research citation impact is another metric highly correlated with the RAE outcome, even though it is not explicitly counted. Now it can be explicitly counted (along with other powerful new performance metrics) and all the rest of the ritualistic time-wasting can be abandoned, without further ceremony.

This represents a great boost for institutional self-archiving in Open Access Institutional Repositories, not only because that is the obvious, optimal means of submission to the new metric RAE, but because it is also a powerful means of maximising research impact, i.e., maximising those metrics: (I hope Research Councils UK (RCUK) is listening!).

Harnad, S. (2001) Why I think that research access, impact and assessment are linked. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.

Harnad, S. (2003) Why I believe that all UK research output should be online. Times Higher Education Supplement. Friday, June 6 2003.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35.

Beans and Bean Counters (2005)

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Adrian Smith (Leeds) wrote:

"See also Mark Maslin [UCL] in Nature:
Research skewed by stress on highest-impact journals

And this new metric RAE policy will help "unskew" it, by instead placing the weight on the individual author/article citation counts (and download counts, CiteRanks, authority counts, citation/download latency, citation/longevity, co-citation signature, and many, many new OA metrics waiting to be devised and validated, including full-text semantic-analysis and semantic-web-tag analyses too) rather than only, or primarily, on the blunter instrument (the journal impact factor).

This is not just about one number any more! The journal tag will still have some weight, but just one weight among many, in an OA scientometric multiple regression equation, customised for each discipline.

This is an occasion for rejoicing at progress, pluralism and openness, not digging up obsolescent concerns about over-reliance on the journal impact factor.

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Ian Sommerville wrote on the CPHC list:

"This is the wording from the budget document
'The Government wants this to continue, but thinks the close correlation between Research Council income and QR income may provide an opportunity for allocating QR using a radically simpler system. '
"The point is made that, at an institutional level, there is a 0.98 correlation between research income and QR. No mention of citation impact. An alternative metric may be proposed for the humanities."

The document actually says

"one or more metrics... could be used to assess research quality and allocate funding, for example research income, citations, publications, research student numbers etc."

You are quite right, though, that the default metric many have in mind is research income, but be patient! Now that the door has been opened to objective metrics (instead of amateurish in-house peer-re-review), this will spawn more and more candidates for enriching the metric equation. If RAE top-slicing wants to continue to be an independent funding source in the present "dual" funding system (RCUK/RAE), it will want to have some predictive metrics that are independent of prior funding. (If RAE instead just wants to redundantly echo research funding, it need merely scale up RCUK research grants to absorb what would have been the RAE top-slice and drop the RAE and dual funding altogether!)

The important thing is to scrap the useless, time-wasting RAE preparation/evaluation ritual we were all faithfully performing, when the outcome was already so predictable from other, cheaper, quantitative sources. Objective metrics are the natural, sensible way to conduct such an exercise, continuously, and once we are doing metrics, many powerful new predictive measures will emerge, over and above grant income and citations. The RAE ranking will not come from one variable, but from a multiple regression equation, with many weighted predictor metrics in an Open Access world, in which research full-texts in their own authors' Institutional Repositories are citation-linked, download-monitored and otherwise scientometrically assessed and analysed continuously.

Hitchcock, S., Brody, T., Gutteridge, C., Carr, L., Hall, W., Harnad, S., Bergmark, D. and Lagoze, C. (2002) Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward. D-Lib Magazine 8(10).

Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).

Citebase impact ranking engine (2001)
Usage/citation correlator/predictor

Stevan Harnad

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Research Assessment at 15:43 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

Monday, March 13. 2006

Wellcome Trust and the 6-month embargo

The Wellcome Trust will have the eternal historical distinction of having been the first research funder to actually mandate Open Access (OA) self-archiving (May 2005):

"Comparing the Wellcome OA Policy and the RCUK (draft) Policy"

This represented a very important forward step for the planet's progress toward the optimal and inevitable target: 100% OA. The earlier well-intentioned but much-flawed -- and since failed -- NIH Public Access Policy alas did not help advance OA, but rather missed an opportunity and inadvertently held things back for at least 2 years. But the hope now is that -- inspired in part by the far better model provided by the Wellcome Trust policy -- the NIH policy will be revised, becoming a self-archiving requirement instead of just a self-archiving request, no longer allowing a delay of up to 12 (or even 6) months.

It does not follow, however, that the current Wellcome Trust policy is unflawed, or that it provides the optimal model for others to follow. It was a great help at its historic time, as a counterweight to the far more flawed NIH policy, but at this historic point, the Wellcome Trust policy too risks becoming a retardant instead of a facilitator of OA, if it is imitated by others in its flaws instead of its strengths.

The strength of the Wellcome Policy is that (1) it is an exception-free requirement, not an optional request, and that (2) it does not allow a delay of longer than 6 months.

Its flaw is that (a) it allows any delay at all and that (b) it requires self-archiving in a central, 3rd-party repository (PubMed Central; PMC) instead of the author's own institutional OA Institutional Repository (IR) (from which PMC could then harvest if/when it wishes).

The two flaws are linked. For the simple and natural way to rule out delays is to require immediate deposit of the accepted, final draft in the author's own institutional OA IR (immediately upon acceptance for publication), but merely request/encourage that access to the deposited draft should be immediately set to "Open Access." That leaves the author the option to provisionally set access instead as "Restricted Access" if need be (for up to 6 months).

How is this linked to the requirement to deposit in PMC instead of at home? Because PMC is neither the author nor the author's institution. It is not even the Wellcome Trust. It is a generic, 3rd-party repository, which publishers can (perhaps rightly) construe as a rival 3rd-party publisher. Publishers are certainly within their rights to block or embargo rival 3rd-party publishing. (Whether it makes any sense to try to treat a 3rd-party OA repository as a rival publisher in the OAI-interoperable age is another matter!)

But the author and the author's own institution certainly cannot be construed as a rival 3rd-party publisher: They are the party of the first part, the content-provider, and the publisher is only the party of the second part: the value-adder and vendor.

And that is why far more journals have given their green light to author self-archiving in their own respective institutional OA IRs, than to self-archiving in a central 3rd-party repository like PMC. And that is also why PMC-archiving is more vulnerable to a publisher embargo.

But there is an ultra-simple way to require immediate deposit while accommodating any publisher embargo at the same time: Require immediate deposit in the author's own OA IR -- immediately upon acceptance for publication -- and harvest the full-text into PMC after 6 months!

That way the deposit is, without exception, immediate, and for about 93% of articles, access too will be immediately OA. (Those articles, too, can be immediately harvested into PMC.)

For the c. 7% of articles set to Restricted Access, the metadata will be immediately visible anyway, and emailed eprint-requests (facilitated and automatized with the help of the IR software) can fulfil the access-needs of would-be users who cannot afford access to the proprietary journal version during the embargo period.

Why not implement the deposit/access-setting distinction, but in PMC rather than in the author's own IR? Because it fails to generalise to all the rest of OA research output (in all fields of research, not just biomedical). The Wellcome Trust funds some of the world's biomedical research; NIH funds more; but there are vasts amounts of further research -- in biology, medicine, physical sciences, engineering, social sciences and even the humanities -- that would all fail to benefit from a parochial PMC mandate for biomedical research. If, instead, funders like Wellcome and NIH mandated that their fundees self-archive in their own institutional OA IRs, that would effectively "tile" all of OA space, effectively and completely, as universities cover all fields of research output. (Central OA repositories like PMC and others would still be available for any orphan works from unaffiliated researchers.)

In other words, funders are not helping world OA if they keep thinking of it as a go-it-alone operation. Funders only fund bits; central OA repositories don't exist for all disciplines and fields; and even if they did, they -- unlike the researchers' institutions -- do not have the clout to reinforce scattered funder mandates with institutional self-archiving mandates, to ensure that all their institutional research output is indeed self-archived.

So the simple and sensible way to update and optimise the pioneering Wellcome Trust self-archiving mandate would be to (1) require the self-archiving to be done in the fundee's own institutional OA IR (as the UK Select Committee proposed), (2) require it to be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, (3) encourage immediate access-setting to OA, (4) require access-setting at OA by 6 months at the latest, and (5) harvest the metadata into PMC immediately upon deposit -- and the full-text into PMC (if need be -- there's a case to be made for just linking to the IR version) within 6 months at the latest.

Why is Wellcome Trust not making this simple and obvious update without even any need for prompting? I think it is because there are again green and gold wires crossed: Over and above its mission to ensure that all Wellcome-funded research (and, hopeably, all research) is made OA, the Wellcome Trust has the further worthy goal of encouraging a transition to the OA (gold) publishing model. This is all fine, but not if the slow, uncertain transition to gold OA is supported at the expense of a speedy, certain transition to 100% OA itself (green).

And that is what I think is happening: Wellcome is not doing everything it could to hasten OA itself, because it is not committed only to OA, but to publishing reform too.

My own view is that publishing reform will take care of itself, and that the urgent task is to get to 100% OA as soon as possible. (Indeed, that itself will probably prove the most important stimulant to publishing reform.) But to slow the immediately feasible and certain transition to OA in the service of far slower and less certain -- and more hypothetical -- measures to induce publishing reform, is not, I think, to help OA along the road to the optimal and inevitable (and already overdue) outcome.

Some comments:

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) [RK] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

RK: "Please note the Wellcome Trust currently does NOT have any plans to reduce the 6 month time limit on its grant condition. The grant condition requires published research (original research papers in peer reviewed journals) arising in part or whole from Trust funding to be placed in Pubmed Central (or UK PMC when it exists) no later than 6 months after the date of publication."

No need to reduce the 6 months if Wellcome does not wish to. Just mandate immediate deposit (in the fundee's own OA IR) and let delayed access-setting bear the burden of the delay. Meanwhile, everyone gets into the habit of self-archiving at home, and emailing eprints can bridge the gap, universally and uniformly.

RK: "It is obvious that a potential delay of up to 6 months is not ideal in terms of the timing of access, but it is a realistic response to the very real concerns of publishers, large and small, that self archiving is a threat to their business model. Whether this is eventually shown to be the case is immaterial as it is this perception that we need to deal with."

Fine. As noted: Mandate immediate deposit and allow the option of delayed access-setting.

RK: " As the only funding organisation with a mandate in its grant condition to support open access through open access publishing and archiving in PMC we are very well aware how many journals are currently at odds with this policy."

Note the conflation of open access provision (through self-archiving, green) with open access publishing (gold)...

RK: "That is why, in conjunction with JISC, we are funding an extension of the Sherpa/Romeo project to identify, at the journal level, which journals will allow a copy of the published paper to be deposited into PMC/UKPMC so it is available no later than 6 months after the original publication date."

It is always good to extend Sherpa/Romeo's coverage, but Romeo already lists embargoes, if any. So surely what Romeo needs is more coverage of journal self-archiving policies, not a focus on 6-month embargoes!

RK: "In order to encourage experiments in alternative business models to the subscription model the Trust also explicitly supports open access publishing as part of the research funding process."

So far, so good. Funding authors' OA (gold) publishing charges is very constructive and helpful. But now this:

RK: " That is why we provided some assistance to OUP, Blackwell's and Springer in drafting the author licence for their various open access offerings so that they were explicitly compliant with publishing and depositing in an archive such as PMC."

This sort of thing simply encourages the locking in of a 6-month embargo instead of helping to phase it out!

If the Wellcome Trust instead simply mandated immediate deposit and let access-setting bear the weight of any embargoes, it would not need to get into the business of entrenching and canonizing embargoes instead of letting them die a quiet death of natural causes!

RK: " We see open access repositories and open access publishing as complimentary exercises and to us, and the publishers we talk to, there is a direct link between the impact of self archiving and the publishing process so it is a pragmatic response to deal with both issues in parallel."

What is complementary today is: (1) non-OA publishing, (2) OA publishing, and (3) OA repositories for the author self-archiving of both (1) and (2).

Self-archiving is not a form of OA publishing, and the immediate and reachable goal -- the one that justifies OA in the first place, namely, access to 100% of published research articles -- is a transition to 100% OA, not necessarily a transition to OA publishing.

RK: " In time the most likely scenario, and one the Trust is supporting, is that open access publishing, or another model yet to be invented, will become the norm and publishers will be able to operate without a reliance on subscriptions. As such the 6 month embargo period will be kept under review but at the moment the Trust has no plans to change it."

That's fine. Let the allowable 6-month delay stand, but let it be a delay in access-setting, not deposit. And let the immediate deposit be in the fundee's own institutional IR, with PMC harvesting it after the allowable delay -- rather than delaying the deposit itself, and insisting it be in PMC!

Stevan Harnad

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 17:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Universities and research funders are both invited to use this document to help encourage the adoption of an Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at their institution. Note that this recommended "Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access" (IDOA) policy model (also called the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") has been specifically formulated to be immune from any delays or embargoes (based on publisher policy or copyright restrictions): The deposit -- of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) -- is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions. But whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible (immediately wherever possible, and otherwise preferably with a maximal embargo cap at 6 months).

This IDOA policy is greatly preferable to, and far more effective than a policy that allows delayed deposit (embargo) or opt-out as determined by publisher policy or copyright restrictions. The restrictions apply only to the access-setting, not to the deposit, which must be immediate. Closed Access deposit is purely an institution-internal book-keeping matter, with the institution's own assets, and no publisher policy or copyright restriction applies to it.

[In the meanwhile, if there needs to be an embargo period, the IR software has a semi-automated EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button that allows any would-be user to request (by entering their email address and clicking) and then allows any author to provide (by simply clicking on a URL that appears in the eprint request received by email) a single copy of the deposited draft, by email, on an individual basis (a practice that falls fully under Fair Use). This provides almost-immediate, almost-Open Access to tide over research usage needs during any Closed Access period.]

1. Research Accessibility

1.1 There exist 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (and conference proceedings) publishing 2.5 million articles per year, across all disciplines, languages and nations.

1.2 No university anywhere, not even the richest, can afford to subscribe to all or most of the journals that its researchers may need to use

1.3 Hence no article is accessible to all of its potential users, and hence all articles are losing some of their research impact (usage and citations).

2. Research Impact: Usage and Citations

2.1 This is confirmed by recent findings, independently replicated by many investigators, showing that articles for which their authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher’s version by self-archiving their own final drafts free for all on the web are downloaded and cited twice as much across all 12 scientific, biological, social science and humanities disciplines analysed so far. (Note: there are no discipline differences in benefits of self-archiving, only in awareness.)

2.2 The total citation counts for articles submitted to the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) are also very closely correlated with departmental RAE rankings (despite the fact that citations are not directly counted by RAE). More citations mean higher RAE ranking.

2.3 Hence citation counts are (i) robust indicators of research performance, (ii) they are not currently maximised for those articles that are not self-archived and (iii) those articles that are being self-archived have a substantial competitive advantage over those that are not.

3. University Self-Archiving Mandates Maximise Research Impact

3.1 Only 15% of the 2.5 million articles published annually are being spontaneously self-archived worldwide today.

3.2 Creating an Institutional Repository (IR) and encouraging staff to self-archive their articles therein is a good first step, but it is not sufficient to raise the self-archiving rate appreciably above the 15% baseline for spontaneous self-archiving.

3.3 Adding library help to encourage and assist staff to self-archive raises the self-archiving rate somewhat, but insufficiently.

3.4 The correct measure of institutional success in self-archiving is the ratio of annual self-archived articles in an institution’s IR relative to that institution’s total annual article output.

3.5 The only institutions that are reliably approaching a 100% annual self-archiving rate today are those that not only create an IR (3.2) and provide library help (3.3) for depositing, but also adopt a self-archiving policy requirement (or "mandate").

3.6 A self-archiving mandate is a simple and natural extension of universities’ already existing mandate to publish research findings (“publish or perish”); it is already linked to incentives by the fact that staff are promoted and funded on the basis of research performance indicators, of which citation impact is a prominent correlate, as in the RAE (2.2).

3.7 Two international, cross-disciplinary JISC surveys have found that 95% of authors will comply with a self-archiving mandate (81% willingly, 14% reluctantly).

3.8 The four institutions worldwide that have adopted a self-archiving mandate to date (CERN in Switzerland, Queensland University of Technology in Australia, Minho University in Portugal, and the ECS Department at University of Southampton) have each confirmed the outcome of the JISC author surveys (3.7), with their institutional self-archiving rates reliably climbing toward 100%,whereas institutions without mandates remain at the 15% spontaneous self-archiving baseline rate

.4. Action: This university should now mandate self-archiving university-wide

4.1 This university should now maximise its own research impact and set an example for the rest of the world by adopting a self-archiving mandate university-wide.

4.2 As indicated by the JISC survey and the empirical experience of the other 3 mandating institutions (3.8): there is no need for any penalties for non-compliance with the mandate; the mandate (and its own rewards: enhanced research access and impact) will take care of itself.

4.31 What needs to be mandated:
Immediate Deposit and Optional Access (IDOA):

- immediately upon acceptance for publication
- deposit in the university’s Institutional Repository
- the author’s final accepted draft (not the publisher’s proprietary PDF)
- both its full-text and its bibliographic metadata (author, date, title, journal, etc.)
(Note that only the depositing itself needs to be mandated. Setting the access privileges to the full-text can be left up to the author, with Open Access strongly encouraged, but not mandated. This makes the university’s self-archiving mandate completely independent of publishers’ self-archiving policies.)

4.32 The Eprints software allows authors to choose to set access as Open Access (OA) or Restricted Access (RA):
OA: both metadata and full-text are made visible and accessible to all would-be users web-wide
RA: metadata are visible and accessible web-wide but full-text is not
4.4 The decision as to whether to set full-text access as OA or RA can be left up to the author; 93% of authors will set full-text access as OA (4.2); for the remaining 7%, the Eprints software still makes it possible for any would-be user web-wide to request an eprint of the full-text automatically by email -- by just cut-pasting their own email address into a box and clicking; the author immediately receives the request and can instantly email the eprint with one click. The result will be 100% access to all Southampton research output, 93% immediately and directly, with one keystroke, 7% indirectly after a short delay, with a few extra keystrokes by user and author.

5. The Importance of Prompt Action

5.1 Self-archiving is effortless, taking only a few minutes and a few keystrokes; library help is available too (but hardly necessary).

5.2 The university should not delay in adopting a self-archiving mandate: 100% OA is both optimal and inevitable -- for research, researchers, their universities, their funders, and the tax-paying public that supports both the research and the universities. It will also give this university a strong competitive impact advantage over later adopters.

5.3 An early adopter not only provides a model for the world with its university-wide self-archiving policy but at the same stroke it maximizes its own research impact and research impact ranking.

5.4 The mandate need have no penalties or sanctions in order to be successful; it need only be formally adopted, with the support of Heads of Schools, the library, and computing services. The rest will take care of itself naturally of its own accord, as the experience of Southampton ECS, Minho, QUT and CERN has already demonstrated.

APPENDIX:
Southampton University Resources for Supporting Open Access Worldwide

A1 U. Southampton ECS department was the first department or institution in the world to adopt a self-archiving mandate (2001).

A2 ECS hosts Psycprints (1991), BBSPrints (1994), Open Journals (1995), OpCit (1996), CogPrints (1997); the American Scientist Open Access Forum (1998).

A3 ECS designed the first and most widely used software for creating institutional archives (GNU Eprints, 2000), now already used by about 200 institutions worldwide; ECS also created Citebase (2002), the citation-based OA search engine (well before Google Scholar).

A4 ECS conducted many of the seminal studies empirically demonstrating the citation impact advantage of self-archiving across all disciplines; ECS also maintains the growing and widely used bibliography of the accumulating findings on the OA Impact Advantage.

A5 ECS/Eprints maintains ROAR, the Registry of Open Access Repositories, tracking the number, size and growth of IRs and their contents worldwide.

A6 ECS/Eprints maintains ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies, tracking the institutions worldwide that have adopted self-archiving policies, from recommendations to full mandates.

A7 ECS/Eprints maintains the ROMEO Directory of Journal Policies on Author Self-Archiving: 93% of the nearly 9000 journals registered to date (including all the principal publishers and the core ISI journals) have already formally endorsed author self-archiving; only 7% of journals have not.

A8 ECS/Southampton successfully lobbied the UK Parliamentary Select Committee in 2004 to mandate self-archiving; this led directly to the RCUK self-archiving mandate proposal, the Berlin 3 Policy Recommendation (formulated at Southampton) and the development of RAE submission mechanisms for the world’s two principal IR softwares (GNU Eprints, and MIT’s Dspace, both written by Southampton’s Rob Tansley).

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Sunday, March 12. 2006

Optimizing Open Access Guidelines of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

The Open Access (OA) guidelines of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) are very, very welcome, but I hope that a few seemingly minor details (see below) can be revised to make them an effective model for others worldwide:

DFG Passes Open Access Guidelines

Information for Researchers No. 04 30 January 2006

In 2003 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The DFG supports the culture of open access. Unhindered access to publications increases the distribution of scientific knowledge, thereby enhancing the authors' visibility and contributing to their reputations.

The DFG has now tied open access into its funding policy. During their meetings in January 2006, the DFG's Senate and Joint Committee recommended encouraging funded scientists to also digitally publish their results and make them available via open access.

The first problem concerns this clause:

"recommended encouraging funded scientists to also digitally publish their results and make them available via open access"

On the one hand, this clause is too weak: It is specifically because the NIH only "recommended/encouraged" that its public access policy has failed and now needs to be strengthened to "required/mandated."

On the other hand, the present clause is far too vague and ambiguous:

(1) Virtually all journals today are hybrid paper/digital already, so recommending/encouraging that the publication should have a "digital version" is breaking down open doors.

(2) What needs to be brought out clearly is that what is actually being required is that a digital version of the publication should be made open access (OA) -- by self-archiving it (depositing it in an OA repository).

(3) What can also be recommended/encouraged (but not required) is to publish in an OA journal where possible.

(4) All ambiguity about "publishing" and "publication" should be eliminated, by saying (and meaning) that "publishing" means publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, whereas depositing a published article in an OA repository is not publishing but access-provision. A published article is already published! Self-archiving increases the access to that publication by making it available to those would-be users who cannot afford subscription access to the publisher's proprietary version.

Recommended re-wording:

"require funded scientists to also self-archive their published results in an online repository to make them available via open access"

(5) No rights renegotiation is necessary at all for the 93% of journals that already endorse immediate self-archiving

(6) For the 7% of journals that do not yet endorse self-archiving, no rights renegotiation is needed for immediate depositing, but rights can be negotiated for setting Open Access.

NB: "OA Self-Archiving" means (i) depositing the full text and metadata in a web repository and (ii) setting access to the full-text as Open Access. The depositing itself (i) (where no one can see the full-text but the author) requires no permission from anyone! The only conceivable rights issue concerns access-setting.

"In order to put secondary publications (i.e. self-archived publications by which the authors provide their scientific work on the internet for free following conventional publication) on the proper legal footing, scientists involved in DFG-funded projects are also requested to reserve the exploitation rights."

(7) Please don't call providing OA to an already-published article "secondary publication"! In a formal sense self-archiving can indeed be construed that way, but that is not a construal that clarifies, it merely confuses. Leave publication to publishers. Authors don't publish their own articles, let alone publish their own already-published articles! They provide access to them, just as they did in paper days when they provided reprints or photocopies, none of which were called "secondary publication." Secondary publishers are publishers, 3rd parties (not the author, and not the primary publisher), that republish an entire published work; or they are indexers/abstracters, that republish parts of it. Self-archivng authors are not secondary publishers of their own published work.

(8) Whereas it is certainly useful and desirable to "reserve the exploitation rights" for authors' published articles, this is not a prerequisite for self-archiving their own drafts (rather than the publisher's PDF), and certainly not for the 68% of journals that are already "green," having given their official blessing to author self-archiving of postprints -- nor for the 25% more that have endorsed preprint self-archiving. Rights renegotiation is hence moot for all but 7% of the c. 8800 journals indexed in Romeo (and that includes virtually all the principal international journals).

(9) Most important: The rights negotiation is not about the depositing (which should be mandatory, and immediate upon acceptance for publication) but only about the access-setting -- i.e., whether access to the deposited full-text is set to "Open Access" or only "Restricted Access" (and if the latter, then for how long).

Recommended re-wording:

"For publications that they self-archive on the internet for free following publication, scientists involved in DFG-funded projects are also encouraged -- if the publisher has not already endorsed immediate author self-archiving -- to retain the immediate right to set access as 'Open Access'."

The guidelines continue:

Recommendations are currently being integrated into the usage guidelines, which form an integral part of every approval. They are worded as follows:

The DFG expects the research results funded by it to be published and to be made available, where possible, digitally and on the internet via open access.

"To achieve this, the contributions involved should either be published in discipline-specific or institutional electronic archives (repositories), or directly in referenced or recognised open access journals, in addition to conventional publishing."

The last sentence is awkward and ambiguous, mixing up publishing and self-archiving, but it is easily clarified: "To achieve this, all work should be published either in conventional journals or in recognised peer-reviewed open access journals; and in addition (the author's draft of) all publications should be self-archived in discipline-specific or institutional electronic archives (repositories)."
The guidelines continue:
"When entering into publishing contracts scientists participating in DFG-funded projects should, as far as possible, permanently reserve a non-exclusive right of exploitation for electronic publication of their research results for the purpose of open access. Here, discipline-specific delay periods of generally 6-12 months can be agreed upon, before which publication of previously published research results in discipline-specific or institutional electronic archives may be prohibited."
Recommended revision:
"When entering into publishing contracts with journals that do not already explicitly endorse immediate author self-archiving, scientists participating in DFG-funded projects should, as far as possible, permanently reserve a non-exclusive right to set access to their deposited draft as Open Access immediately upon deposit. An access-delay interval of 6-12 months is discouraged, but allowable under current DGF policy; during this interval the publication, always deposited immediately upon acceptance, may be placed under Restricted Access rather than Open Access."

(During the Restricted Access period, the metadata will still be visible webwide, and individual users can email the author to request an eprint of the full text.)
Allowing any Restricted Access interval at all is the weaker form of OA mandate, but it is still sufficient. It is critically important, however, that:

(a) Depositing the full text is required, not just requested

(b) The depositing itself must always be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, not after the access-delay interval agreed with the publisher

(c) During any agreed access-delay interval (one year maximum) access to the full-text can be set as Restricted Access rather than Open Access

I would also recommend against permitting a delay as long as one year: NIH is now moving from a year to 4 months; Wellcome allows 6 months but is planning to reduce that. There is no need for DFG to be more permissive of access restriction.

The guidelines finish thus:
Please ensure that a note indicating support of the project by the DFG is included in the publication.

The revised usage guidelines are expected to be available in April 2006.

Further information on open access is available at
http://www.dfg.de/lis/openaccess

For further information contact Dr. Johannes Fournier, Tel.: +49 (0)228/885-2418, e-mail: johannes.fournier@dfg.de.

Stevan Harnad

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Tuesday, December 13. 2005

Royal Society: II

Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, has written a reply (7 Dec) to the Open Letter by Fellows of the Royal Society (7 Dec) dissenting from the Royal Society position statement on 'open access' (24 Nov)

Because Lord Rees's text is only available as a page image, I have not yet been able to quote/comment it directly.

However, the following text, distributed to the press last week by a spokesman for the Royal Society, contains some of the same verbatim text; I have commented on it for now. These comments should not, however, be construed as comments on Lord Rees's version (for which I hope someone will send me the digital text: I hope distributing it as a page-image was not designed to fend of quote/commenting!)
Royal Society: "We have today received a collective letter regarding the Society's policy on 'open access', signed by a small number of the 1274 Fellows of the Royal Society. The letter appears to reflect a misunderstanding of a re-statement of the Society's position which was published on 24 November 2005."
The number of dissenting fellows is growing daily. More important, the substance of their questions and criticism will have to be dealt with openly now.
Royal Society: "The Council of the Royal Society considered the issue of 'open access' in February 2004 before publication of a submission to the inquiry into scientific publications by the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in March 2004. The latest position statement and the Society's submission to RCUK's consultation on access to research outputs, which was also published on 24 November, are both consistent with the Society's evidence to the select committee."
(1) What consultation was there with the 1274 Fellows about that original Royal Society position statement in February 2004?

(2) That was a submission to the House of Commons select committee deliberations a year and a half ago. That committee has since published an outcome, followed by many further developments, worldwide as well as in the UK, such as the RCUK policy proposal, which acted upon the committee's principal recommendation, which was even referred to approvingly by the government (even as it rejected the committee's other recommendations).

(3) Were all of these subsequent developments taken into consideration, and were the 1274 Fellows informed? Were their views sought? Was there consultation? Or are the dissenting 46 (now 59 and growing) the only ones who have even had a chance to make their views heard?
Royal Society: "The Royal Society certainly does not, as the collective letter implies, take a 'negative stance' on open access. We are simply concerned that open access is achieved without the risk of unintended damage to peer-review, quality control and long term accessibility of the scientific literature."
These are abstract principles. The RCUK is trying to put them into practice. The concrete question on the table is whether the RS is for or against the immediate implementation of the already long-delayed RCUK self-archiving policy. It is quite clear that the RS statement is against this immediate implementation, requesting still further delay (after over a year's worth of time to consult and inform, which seems to have been used instead largely to ignore and filibuster).

Indeed, warnings, embargoes and filibusters seem to be the only substantive contribution the RS has thus far made, by way of a stance of any kind.
Royal Society: "The Royal Society is absolutely supportive of the principle of open access and is committed to the widest possible dissemination of research outputs." [emphasis added]
This is more than just the repetition of an abstract principle: It seems to be a statement that is in direct contradiction with what the RS is actually doing, which is to try to defer and deter "the widest possible dissemination of research outputs," as proposed by the RCUK (and many others).
Royal Society: "The Society is itself a delayed open access publisher, providing free access after 12 months, and provides immediate access to researchers in developing countries and also to scientific papers that are of major public interest - for example the results of the farm scale evaluation of genetically modified crops."
There is no such thing as "delayed open access publishing", otherwise all publishers are "delayed open access publishers", some merely having very long delay periods, corresponding to human mortality and the heat death of the universe. The Royal Society, like all non-OA publishers, is an embargoed-access publisher, and that is just fine:

The RCUK is not proposing to require publishers to become OA publishers. It is proposing to require RCUK fundees to provide "the widest possible dissemination" for their own (funded) research articles -- by supplementing the publisher-based paid-access version with a free online version for those would-be users worldwide who cannot afford access to the former.

The RS is encouraged to continue its own admirable efforts to widen access to its publications, but it should refrain from trying to narrow the efforts of the RCUK to do likewise with its own funded research output.
Royal Society: "However, there is understandable concern that, if researchers can access large numbers of final versions of journal papers from repositories, then they will not be prepared to subscribe to these journals. The Society is not in favour of policies that might reduce scholarly communication by undermining the established subscription model of publishing before the alternatives (such as author-pays journals) have been fully explored and have been shown to be viable in the long term."
The author of this statement for the press (who, I am guessing, represents the publishing tail, not the research head, of that venerable institution) is here demonstrating that no attention has been paid to the accumulated experimental evidence (which is that self-archiving has had no effect at all on subscriptions -- even in the fields where it has already been going on for over 14 years and reached 100% years ago: The The two physics Learned Societies, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, have reported that they support self-archiving, host an archive for self-archiving, and can detect no sign of its "undermining the established subscription model".

To repeat: the RCUK proposal is not to require the "author pays" or any other publishing model. It is to require self-archiving for the sake of "the widest possible dissemination of [RCUK] research outputs." This RS publications representative, in contrast, seems to be arguing for delaying this, as long as possible (after an already long and needless delay). This is not the open-access mentality, but the mentality of filibusters and embargoes -- the last thing that scientific research needs from its own Learned Society.
Royal Society: "The Royal Society is opposed to the proposal issued for consultation by RCUK, which is predicated on a number of unresolved issues, to require researchers in all disciplines to deposit papers in repositories after publication. We believe that any decisions that impact on something as important as the future of scholarly communication should be based on sound evidence. Our published statements on this subject, which have been discussed extensively by the Council of the Royal Society, outline a number of questions that have been raised with us as part of this debate." "One of the main issues is whether the various alternative models are appropriate to all disciplines. Many of signatories of the letter in circulation are from the life sciences and may not realise that concerns about RCUK's proposals have been raised with the Society by the mathematics, chemistry and physics communities."
(1) The RCUK is not proposing an "alternative model" for publishing or publishers: It is proposing that RCUK fundees self-archive their research articles for "the widest possible dissemination of research outputs."

(2) There is zero evidence that self-archiving "undermin[es] the established subscription model of publishing".

(3) All the experimental evidence to date in the field that actually has the empirical data, physics, is that 100% self-archiving can and does co-exist peacefully with "the established subscription model of publishing".

(4) The empirical data on the research-impact enhancing benefits of OA self-archiving come from all fields (physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences and humanities): No discipline fails to benefit from "the widest possible dissemination of research outputs."

I hope this makes clear how little it means to profess to support high-minded principles in the abstract, while concretely opposing their practice on the ground (by trying to delay and deter them under the pretext that first still further "evidence needs to be collected". This is a good recipe for embargoing "the widest possible dissemination of research outputs" till doomsday (on the strength of nothing but an empirically groundless doomsday prophecy) rather than promoting it.
Royal Society: "In view of the importance of this issue, and the very significant long-term consequences that changes in policy could have, we believe that more evidence needs to be collected. As contribution to this evidence base, we believe that a study should be commissioned to assess the relative merits of the various models that have been proposed under the rather broad banner of 'open access', including that outlined by RCUK in its consultation document."
Again, the non-sequitur that the RCUK is proposing a "model" rather than simply proposing to self-archive, on the basis of the cumulated experimental evidence of its positive effects on research and its absence of negative effects on publishing. (To call this a "model" is to conflate OA publishing with OA self-archiving in order to try to defer/deter OA self-archiving as if it were an alternative publishing model, rather than what it really is: an author practice of supplementing access to the publisher's version with access to the author's version for those would-be users who cannot afford access to the publisher's version -- for the sake of "the widest possible dissemination of research outputs.")
Royal Society: "Such a study should assess what potential benefits and drawbacks could result from changing current practices to each of the proposed new models."
No new models are being proposed. Self-archiving is being proposed.
Royal Society: "It would need to examine how these benefits and drawbacks may vary from discipline to discipline and the impacts on researchers who may not be funded through traditional routes."
All disciplines have already been demonstrated to benefit from "the widest possible dissemination of research outputs". (Why on earth would one even have expected otherwise?)

Funding has absolutely nothing to do with it (other than that RCUK is a research-funder, proposing to require "the widest possible dissemination of [RCUK] research outputs").

What the RS publishing representative is probably single-mindedly focusing on here, and what he means by "funding" is, of course, the funding of the "author-pays" model -- which is not what the RCUK is proposing to require at all!

(The RCUK has merely, along with requiring self-archiving, offered to help pay author OA publishing costs if/when needed: a rather innocent and generous proposal about which the RS should have nothing to say one way or the other; indeed, the RS itself helps pay OA publishing costs!)
Royal Society: "Reliable evidence would allow the research community as a whole, including RCUK, to make better informed decisions about whether changes in current practice are desirable. We have indicated to RCUK that we would be happy to discuss with them how such a study might be taken forward."
Again, the RS rep is talking about changes in publishing practice, which the RCUK is not (and cannot) require. The RCUK is proposing to require that its fundees provide "the widest possible dissemination of [RCUK] research outputs" -- by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories.

How and why would further study of hypothetical changes in a publishing model that the RCUK is not proposing clarify whether RCUK should or should not go ahead with what they are proposing, which is to require that its fundees provide "the widest possible dissemination of [RCUK] research outputs" -- by self-archiving them?
Royal Society: "We are also aware of a report that appeared in 'The Times Higher Education Supplement' a few weeks ago suggesting that RCUK was delaying publication of its proposals in light of pressure from commercial publishers of scientific journals. We feel that the scientific community should also be aware of the many issues that have been raised by the learned societies and professional associations. These not-for-profit organisations publish more than a third of all scientific journals and use their publishing surpluses to fund activities such as academic conferences and public lectures."
Repeating the same incoherent non-sequitur louder, and in unison with others who have voiced it, does not make it one bit more coherent or compelling.
Royal Society: "A letter from Lord Rees of Ludlow responding to the signatories of the collective letter is being published on the Royal Society's website."
I look forward to responding to a digital draft of Lord Rees's reply as soon it is made openly accessible...

Stevan Harnad

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 03:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, December 5. 2005

DASER 2 IR Meeting and NIH Public Access Policy

This is a summary (from my own viewpoint) of the Washington meeting this weekend sponsored by American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST), organized by Michael Leach (Harvard, President, ASIS):
Digital Archives for Science and Engineering Resources
(DASER 2)
(For some other slants on DASER 2, see these two blogs; but beware, as they do contain some notable garbles and omissions, having been blogged in real time by Dorothea Salo and Christina Pikas.)

DASER 2 rehearsed some familiar developments, highlighted some of them, and brought out one potentially important new one (re. the NIH Public Access Policy).

The familiar developments were the worldwide growth in Institutional Repositories (IRs), and in new services to help institutions to create, maintain or even host IRs: ProQuest (using Bepress software), BioMed Central OpenRepository (using Dspace software) and Eprints Services (using Eprints software).

Fedora software was also discussed, but it was quite apparent (at least to me!) that at this DASER meeting, whose specific focus was digital science/engineering resources -- hence Open Access (OA) IRs in particular, targeting the self-archiving of institutional peer-reviewed science/engineering article output, in order to maximise its visibility, usage and impact, rather than digital curation in general -- Fedora's much wider and more diffuse target (the collection and curation of any and all institutional digital content, incoming or outgoing, research or otherwise) was not the urgent priority. Indeed, there are good reasons for expecting that if the IR movement first puts its full weight and energy behind the focussed archiving of 100% of each institution's own OA IR target content, that will itself prove to be the most effective way to launch and advance the more general digital-curation agenda too.

There was likewise considerable time devoted to the future of publishing, with much discussion of OA publishing and the possibility of an eventual transition to OA publishing. But here too, the lesson was that the best contribution that OA IRs in particular can make to this possible/eventual transition is to hasten their own transition to the institutional self-archiving of 100% of their own OA target content.

Present and contributing very constructively were the two Learned Society Publishers in whose discipline author self-archiving has been going on the longest, and has gone the farthest (having reached 100% years ago in some fields): The American Physical Society (the first publisher to adopt [in 1994] an explicit "green" policy on author self-archiving [today about 76% of publishers and 93% of journals are green]) and the Institute of Physics (likewise green, along with some notable experiments in "gold" OA publishing).

The keynote speaker was Jan Velterop, formerly publisher of "pure gold" BioMed Central, and now director of OA for Springer's "optional gold" Open Choice. Jan's main concern was (understandably) to encourage authors to pick the gold option and to encourage their institutions and research councils to fund the author costs.

Jan applauded the growth in the IR movement but noted a substantial decrease in the number of postings on the American Scientist Open Access Forum (AmSci) in 2004-2005 compared to prior years, and worried that this might reflect a decrease in OA momentum.

On the contrary: the decreased AmSci volume was intentional. In 2004, a new policy for AmSci postings was announced, reserving the Forum for concrete, practical discussion of institutional and research-funder OA policy design and implementation. AmSci's former open-ended (and unending) philosophical and ideological debate about open access was instead redirected to the many other OA lists that have spawned since the AmSci OA Forum's inception in 1998:
"[T]his Forum, the first of what is now a half dozen lists devoted to OA matters, is -- as has been announced several times -- now reserved for the discussion of concrete, practical means of accelerating OA growth." [December 2004]
The DASER conference also devoted time and thought to the future of librarians in the digital and OA era; again, insofar as IRs are concerned, a good investment of librarians' available time, energy and resources is in helping to create and fill IRs, first OA IRs, and then eventually expanding them to wider and wider digital content, thereby again facilitating the inevitable and desirable transition. (My own personal view, however, is that librarians should abstain from speculation about the future of peer review, which is not really their field of expertise; I also think retraining librarians to become institutional in-house publishers may not be the best use of their time and talents.)

That librarians can be an enormous help in getting institutional authors to deposit their OA content in their IRs was illustrated in my own talk, using examples from around the world (CERN, U. Minho, Southampton ECS) but with especially striking data from Australia (with thanks to Arthur Sale, University of Tasmania and Paula Callan, Queensland University of Technology). I also reported on the growing evidence for the dramatic OA research impact advantage across all disciplines, now including the humanities and social sciences, and its implications for research and researcher funding and progress..

The OA impact advantage, IRs, and librarian-help are all necessary conditions for filling IRs with OA content, but to make them into a jointly sufficient condition, one further critical component is needed, and this has been demonstrated in case after case: The only IRs that are well along the road toward toward 100% OA are the ones that also have an institutional self-archiving requirement. Without that, spontaneous OA self-archiving is hovering at about 5% - 15% globally..

Which brings us to the last and newest development reported at DASER: The NIH Public Access Policy is flawed and failing -- its deposit rate is at about 2%, which is even below the global average for spontaneous self-archiving. But the good news is that NIH has realized this, and is planning to do something about it. The question is: what? There is a committee to look at this question, but at a quick glance, it does not seem to include those who actually know what needs to be done, and how, to make the NIH policy work. Represented are librarians and publishers, but missing are the institutional OA policy-makers that can make self-archiving work.

But the solution is simple, and NIH can do it, very easily. First, it is important to face the 3 flaws of the current NIH policy very forthrightly. Here they are, in order of severity:
(1) Deposit is requested rather than required.

(2) The request is not for immediate deposit but deposit within one year of publication.

(3) The request is for deposit in PubMed Central (PMC) rather than in the author's own IR, from which PMC could harvest it.
The reason the deposit is not required and not immediate is related to the reason the deposit is in PMC instead of the author's own IR: NIH has cast itself in the role of a 3rd-party access-provider, via PMC. This is fine, for its own funded research. But then NIH must deal with its publishers and their conditions (which include access-embargoes of up to 12 months, in order to protect against perceived risks to their revenues).

OA itself does not require a 3rd-party access-provider. All it requires is OA! And for that, any OAI-compliant archive, whether the author's own institutional respository or a central repository like PMC will do, because they are all equivalent and interoperable, in the OAI-compliant age, and all accessible to any user or harvester webwide.

So NIH can have what it wants -- 100% of its funded content in PMC within a year of publication -- while still requiring the author's final draft to be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, (preferably in the author's IR, harvestable by PMC, but absent that, directly deposited in PMC).

That leaves only the question of how to set the access-privileges, and now those can be merely the subject of a (strong) request to set them to OA immediately upon deposit -- but with the option left open (sic) for the author to set access instead as restricted to institution-internal and PMC-harvestable (or, for PMC, PMC-administrative-only) if the author has reason to prefer that (the reason presumably being that the article is published in one of the 7% of journals that are not yet green on immediate OA self-archiving).

Is this merely a way of tweaking the current NIH policy so as to get deposits up to 100% without getting immediate OA up to 100%? The answer is: Yes and No. Yes, this policy will immediately drive up NIH deposits from their current 2% level to 100%, because deposit will be a fulfilment condition on receiving the NIH grant. But no, it is not true that it will not generate immediate 100% OA. For it can generate that too, with a far smaller delay-loop than 12 months: something more of the order of a few minutes to 12 hours at most:

The solution is very simple (and we are already building it into the Eprints IR software): The metadata (author, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are of course all immediately OA for 100% of deposited papers, regardless of how the access-privileges for the full-text are set. That means that from the moment the text is deposited, the metadata are visible and accessible to all would-be users and harvesters webwide, thanks to OAI and the OAI search engines, as well as to google scholar and the non-OAI search engines.

But what about the full-text? For about 7% of journal articles (the ones in the non-green journals), access might not be immediately set to OA. What the Eprints software will do when a would-be user encounters this dead-end is that the IR interface will provide a link that will pop up a window allowing the user to send an automatic email to the author (whose email address is part of the IR's internal metadata) requesting to be emailed an eprint of the full-text in question. The requester's email will be sent by the software -- automatically and immediately -- to the author, with a prepared URL that the author need merely click on, in order to have the eprint immediately emailed to the would-be user. (Eprints requests will be counted, as will direct downloads and eventually also citation links.)

This author-mediated access-provision is not quite as convenient, instantaneous or sensible as immediately setting the full-text to unmediated OA, allowing the user to just click to download it; but it is effective 100% OA just the same. And NIH can (as now) harvest the full-text whenever it likes, and can go on to make it OA in PMC whenever it elects to. None of that will be holding back OA any longer.

This immediate-deposit requirement is also the form that the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Self-Archiving Policy is now taking; and this offers a general model for the rest of the world to adopt too.

Note that this slightly modified policy completely side-lines all publisher objections: It is merely a deposit requirement, not an OA access-setting requirement. It is left up to researchers and the would-be users of their research to sort out access-provision according to the needs of research -- exactly as it should be.

This is of course also the policy that institutions should adopt, for their own institutional research output, whether or not funded by NIH or RCUK. An immediate-deposit requirement will result in IRs worldwide filling virtually overnight (at long last).

(The other thing NIH should do is to couple its deposit requirement with an explicit statement of NIH's readiness to cover OA journal publication charges for those NIH fundees who choose to publish their findings in an OA journal.)
P.S. In the last session (which I had to miss, to catch my plane) David Stern suggested central archiving as the way to induce more self-archiving. Unfortunately, that's not the solution, because the problem is not that authors can't find an IR to deposit in: it's that only about 15% of authors are self-archiving spontaneously today (i.e., there are plenty of Institutional Repositories, but they are near-empty). Hence what's needed is not central archiving but "central" self-archiving mandates (from the authors' institutions and funders). Central archives are fine as a provisional locus for authors to self-archive until their institutions have an IR, but they are neither necessary nor optimal otherwise. Centralism is obsolescent in the OAI era: distributed interoperable archives, harvested centrally, are the natural way forward. Local insitutions, being the primary research content-providers, are the best placed, and motivated, to mandate, monitor, and reward compliance with a self-archiving policy for their own institutional research output that is to the joint benefit of authors, their institutions, and their funders (but no other central entity).
Stevan Harnad

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 23:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, November 10. 2005

SSHRC Consultation on Open Access

All bold italic quotes are from:

Social Science and Humanities Research Council
(SSHRC) (Canada) Consultation on Open Access
Should SSHRC adopt [a] regulation requiring that one copy of all research results be deposited in an institutional repository?
Yes, but SSHRC should make sure that what they require to be deposited is the author's final draft, not necessarily the publisher's official version (PDF). That's all the RCUK is requiring; that's all the NIH and Wellcome require; and that's all that's needed for 100% OA.

The publisher's PDF can be deposited too, optionally, if the publisher agrees; but it is important to make sure SSHRC doesn't get bogged down by that irrelevancy, by needlessly insisting on the publisher's version instead of just the author's final draft.
Should such a regulation apply to all forms of research outputs (i.e. peer-reviewed journal articles, non-peer reviewed research reports, monographs, data sets, theses, conference proceedings, etc.)?

It should be mandatory for authors' final drafts of journal and refereed-conference articles for sure.

It's up to SSHRC whether to make it mandatory for data too.

It is tricky to force authors to make unrefereed reports public if they don't wish to, so that should be optional: merely recommended, not required.

Monographs are even trickier, as there is no need to jeopardise securing OA's main target -- research articles -- by needlessly threatening authors' potential revenues from books: Of course SSHRC authors make next to no money that way; and of course many SSHRC authors will be happy to self-archive their monographs anyway; but SSHRC should on no account put the real OA target at risk by needlessly over-reaching: Require self-archiving for articles, but only recommend it (strongly, if SSHRC wishes) for books.

Theses too are tricky, because some are destined to become books, and SSHRC is not really subsidising the thesis itself, just the supervisor's research. So it might inspire less needless author opposition if thesis self-archiving too were strongly recommended, rather than required, as with articles.
Should there be exceptions for research outputs where there is an expectation of financial return to the author (i.e., monographs where royalties are accrued)?
Yes, definitely exempt them: OA is intended for give-away texts, written for the sake of research impact; it is not intended for trade texts, written for the sake of sales-revenue.
In general, there are two accepted routes to open access: Self-archiving - depositing research results and materials in institutional repositories that can be searched by anyone with Internet access;
OA self-archiving is exactly what can and should be mandated.
Open access electronic journals - peer-reviewed journals that provide Internet-based access for readers without subscription charges.
OA journal-publishing cannot and hence should not be mandated, because:
(1) there aren't anywhere near enough suitable OA journals in most fields yet;

(2) dictating authors' choice of journals would only elicit needless opposition from authors;

(3) authors can be mandated, but publishers cannot;

(4) hence mixing OA archiving and OA publishing into the same mandate will just elicit publisher opposition to both (needlessly);

(5) OA self-archiving will already take care of providing 100% OA for all SSHRC research output
Let journal reform take care of itself: SSHRC's concern should only be with research access (and impact). Mixing that up with forced journal-reform will again just elicit needless opposition and delay for the primary target: 100% OA for SSHRC-funded research article output (authors' final drafts) so that all users worldwide can access, use, apply and build upon it, and not just those users who (or whose institutions) happen to be able to afford to access the journal in which the publisher's official version happens to be published. Publishing in OA journals should be encouraged where possible, but not mandated. If SSHRC wishes, it can offer to help support authors' OA journal publishing costs.

In sum: Mandating OA self-archiving and encouraging (and supporting) OA publishing is all that's needed from SSHRC. The rest will come with the territory. But if SSHRC instead needlessly over-reaches, needlessly trying to strong-arm publishing reform directly, the whole thing will just get needlessly bogged down for years more.
Both routes present SSHRC and the research community with operational challenges:
1. Institutional repositories: Building a management and service platform
Institutional repositories present no "operational challenges," either for SSHRC or for institutions. Institutional Repositories (IRs) can and will take care of themselves. SSHRC should just mandate self-archiving, and the IRs will be created and filled.

SSHRC needs no central SSHRC or Canadian archive. Distributed institutional self-archiving is the most natural and efficient route to 100% OA: the IRs are all interoperable because they are OAI-compliant. If SSHRC wishes, it can harvest from them the articles it has funded. See the Swan/Brown JISC study on central vs. distributed institutional self-archiving and central harvesting:

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1):pp. 25-40.
Currently, not all Canadian universities provide an institutional repository service. Some 26 repositories are now in place, or are in development, but this does not yet provide the necessary services for all SSHRC-funded researchers.
Every Canadian university that does not have an IR already is less than $10,000 away from having an IR. Hence this is a red herring.
If required by SSHRC, would you be willing to send all outputs from SSHRC-funded research to an institutional repository?
Of course. (I already do.) Another JISC Swan & Brown international survey has already reported that 90% of Canadian researchers worldwide would comply (80% willingly, 10% reluctantly). This is almost identical to the international average of 95% compliance (81% willingly, 14% reluctantly).

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.
What range of electronic publications and institutional repository services are needed to fully meet the needs of the scholarly community? See, for example erudit.org (www.erudit.org), a Quebec-based electronic service provider. Should this model be extended across Canada?
Erudit is not an institutional repository, it is a journal archive, though it does also offer space to authors for central archiving. See the the Institutional Archive Registry.

Don't mix up journal repositories with institutional repositories. It is the latter that are needed, and all that's missing is the SSHRC mandate. Mandate institutional self-archiving and the archives will be created, and the archives will be filled, with the primary target content (author final drafts of refereed journal articles).

If SSHRC wants to emulate a Quebec self-archiving model, have a look at the institutional self-archiving policy shortly to be announced by l'Université du Québec à Montréal.

Or see the mandates of CERN, University of Minho, University of Zurich, Queensland University of Technology, or University of Southampton.
Open access journals: Revising the SSHRC Aid to Research and Transfer Journals Program. Although SSHRC financially supports the majority of social science and humanities journals produced in Canada , the Aid to Research and Transfer Journals Program does not provide support for non-subscription based journals. Scholarly peer-reviewed journals play a crucial role in the certification of research knowledge. In the context of open access, institutional repositories must be able to distinguish between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed research outputs. Therefore, the continued existence, and financial viability, of journals is clearly a critical issue.
The continued existence of peer-reviewed journals is not at issue, as long as SSHRC resists mixing up publishing reform (gold) with OA self-archiving (green).

Harnad, S. (2005) Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold. Ariadne 43.
It is the authors' final drafts of journal articles that need to be self-archived, and they will be tagged as "peer-reviewed final drafts" (plus journal name).

Journals' financial viability is not at issue; nor is there any objective evidence to date that it is at risk.

The only thing at issue is research access; and the only thing at risk (indeed 50%-250% of it is being outright lost today) is research usage and impact.

Harnad, Stevan (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19(16).
Please comment on each of the three following possible ways to tackle this challenge, taking into consideration the fact that there are limited resources for the support of research:
A "moving wall" system where journal articles are available only by subscription for the first six months, and then made available free of charge.
As a basis for an SSHRC OA policy? Very bad. Why are journal funding issues being mixed up with funded research access issues?

Self-archiving should be immediate, upon acceptance of the final refereed draft for publication by the journal.

No "moving walls" (unless the journal wishes to make its own contents OA after a period of its choosing, which is fine, but completely independent from the issue of immediate self-archiving by the author, and an SSHRC requirement to do it).

"Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" (Jan 2005)
A publication fee, charged by journals to authors, to be considered an eligible expense within a SSHRC research grant. This would require researchers to have access to SSHRC or other grant funds.
Good idea, if the journal is an OA journal; absurd and irrelevant if it is not.
A modification to the SSHRC support program for journals -- which currently covers 40 to 50 per cent of journal expenditures -- to allow grants to cover all peer review, administration = and manuscript preparation costs, but not costs associated with distribution.
Only if the journals become OA. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the SSHRC self-archiving requirement and should not be mixed up with it in any way.
As journal editors, do you allow your contributing authors to place their accepted articles in an institutional repository or on a Web site not connected with the journal? Why, or why not?
Who is being asked? The Romeo registry lists the 8620 journals indexed so far for their self-archiving policy, and 93% of them endorse self-archiving, 7% do not. Journal editors should register their policies if they are not already registered:
As researchers/authors, would you be willing to comply with a SSHRC regulation that requires peer-reviewed articles to be published in an open access journal and/or placed in a publicly-accessible institutional repository?
Why is this question being asked in this illogical and arbitrary composite/interwoven form (worthy of a gerry-rigged referendum query, contingent on all sorts of unfulfilled and unfulfillable premises) instead of being asked in a straight-forward way?

The two (separate!) straight-forward questions should have been:
(1) Would you be willing to comply with a SSHRC regulation that requires peer-reviewed articles to be placed in a publicly-accessible institutional repository?
The replies would then very likely have been the same as those we already know from the two JISC international surveys: >80% willing compliance.)
(2) Would you be willing to comply with a SSHRC regulation that recommends peer-reviewed articles to be published in an open access journal when possible?
(As this is a recommendation and not a mandate, and only pertains to cases when the author judges that a suitable journal exists, the outcome will not be terribly informative; in any case, the 2 JISC surveys have already polled authors worldwide on this score, and they are indeed favorably inclined toward suitable OA journals, if/when they exist. Now back to the real problem, with is the non-existence of OA for the 85% of worldwide research article output that is not yet being self-archived: That is what the SSHRC self-archiving mandate -- (1), above -- is for. The rest will take care of itself.)

Stevan Harnad

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 03:51 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, August 22. 2005

Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration

Tim Berners-Lee (UK, Southampton & US, MIT)
Dave De Roure (UK, Southampton)
Stevan Harnad (UK, Southampton & Canada, UQaM)
Derek Law (UK, Strathclyde)
Peter Murray-Rust (UK, Cambridge)
Charles Oppenheim (UK, Loughborough)
Nigel Shadbolt (UK, Southampton)
Yorick Wilks (UK, Sheffield)

Subbiah Arunachalam (India, MSRF)
Helene Bosc (France, INRA, ret.)
Fred Friend (UK, University College, London)
Andrew Odlyzko (US, University of Minnesota)
Arthur Sale (Australia, University of Tasmania)
Peter Suber (US, Earlham)
SUMMARY: The UK Research Funding Councils (RCUK) have proposed that all RCUK fundees should self-archive on the web, free for all, their own final drafts of journal articles reporting their RCUK-funded research, in order to maximise their usage and impact. ALPSP (a learned publishers' association) now seeks to delay and block the RCUK proposal, auguring that it will ruin journals. All objective evidence from the past decade and a half of self-archiving, however, shows that self-archiving can and does co-exist peacefully with journals while greatly enhancing both author/article and journal impact, to the benefit of both. Journal publishers should not be trying to delay and block self-archiving policy; they should be collaborating with the research community on ways to share its vast benefits.
This is a public reply, co-signed by the above, to the August 5, 2005, public letter by Sally Morris, Executive Director of ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) to Professor Ian Diamond, Chair, RCUK (Research Councils UK), concerning the RCUK proposal to mandate the web self-archiving of authors' final drafts of all journal articles resulting from RCUK-funded research, making them freely accessible to all researchers worldwide who cannot afford access to the official journal version, in order to maximise the usage and impact of the RCUK-funded research findings.

It is extremely important that the arguments and objective evidence for or against the optimality of research self-archiving policy be aired and discussed openly, as they have been for several years now, all over the world, so that policy decisions are not influenced by one-sided arguments from special interests that can readily be shown to be invalid. Every single one of the points made by the ALPSP below is incorrect -- incorrect from the standpoint of both objective evidence and careful logical analysis. We accordingly provide a point by point rebuttal here, along with a plea for an end to publishers' efforts to block or delay self-archiving policy -- a policy that is undeniably beneficial to research and researchers, as well as to their institutions and the public that funds them. Publishers should collaborate with the research community to share the benefits of maximising research access and impact.

(Please note that this is not the first time the ALPSP's points have been made, and rebutted; but whereas the rebuttals take very careful, detailed account of the points made by ALPSP, the ALPSP unfortunately just keeps repeating its points without taking any account of the detailed replies. By way of illustration, the prior ALPSP critique of the RCUK proposal (April 19) was followed on July 1 by a point-by-point rebuttal. The reader who compares the two cannot fail to notice certain recurrent themes that ALPSP keeps ignoring in their present critique. In particular, 3 of the 5 examples that ALPSP cites below as evidence of the negative effects of self-archiving on journals turn out to have nothing at all to do with self-archiving, exactly as pointed out in the earlier rebuttal. The other 2 examples turn out to be positive evidence for the potential of sharing the benefits through cooperation and collaboration between the research and publishing community, rather than grounds for denying research and researchers those benefits through opposition.)

All quotes are from
ALPSP response to RCUK's proposed position statement on access to research outputs
which was addressed to: Professor Ian Diamond, Research Councils UK Secretariat on 5th August, 2005:
ALPSP: "Although the mission of our publisher members is to disseminate and maximise access to research information"
The principle of maximising access to research information is indeed the very essence of the issue at hand. The reader of the following statements and counter-statements should accordingly bear this principle in mind while weighing them: Unlike the authors of books or of magazine and newspaper articles, the authors of research journal articles are not writing in order to sell their words, but in order to share their findings, so other researchers can use and build upon them, in order to advance research progress, to the benefit of the public that funded the research. This usage and application is called research impact. Research impact is a measure of research progress and productivity: the influence that the findings have had on the further course of research and its applications; the difference it has made that a given piece of research has been conducted at all, rather than being left unfunded and undone. Research impact is the reason the public funds the research and the reason researchers conduct the research and report the results. Research that makes no impact may as well not have been conducted at all. One of the primary indicators -- but by no means the only one -- of research impact is the number of resulting pieces of research by others that make use of a finding, by citing it. Citation counts are accordingly quantitative measures of research impact. (The reader is reminded, at this early point in our critique, that it is impossible for a piece of research to be read, used, applied and cited by any researcher who cannot access it. Research access is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for research impact.)

Owing to this central importance of impact in the research growth and progress cycle, the authors of research are rewarded not by income from the sales of their texts, like normal authors, but by 'impact income' based on how much their research findings are used, applied, cited and built upon. Impact is what helps pay the author's salary, what brings further RCUK grant income, and what brings RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) income to the author's institution. And the reason the public pays taxes for the RCUK and RAE to use to fund research in the first place is so that that research can benefit the public -- not so that it can generate sales income for publishers. There is nothing wrong with research also generating sales income for publishers. But there is definitely something wrong if publishers try to prevent researchers from maximising the impact of their research, by maximising access to it. For whatever limits research access limits research progress; to repeat: access is a necessary condition for impact.

Hence, for researchers and their institutions, the need to 'maximise access to research information' is not just a pious promotional slogan: Whatever denies access to their research output is denying the public the research impact and progress it paid for and denying researchers and their institutions the impact income they worked for. Journals provide access to all individuals and institutions that can afford to subscribe to them, and that is fine. But what about all the other would-be users -- those researchers world-wide whose institutions happen to be unable to afford to subscribe to the journal in which a research finding happens to be published? There are 24,000 research journals and most institutions can afford access only to a small fraction of them. Across all fields tested so far (including physics, mathematics, biology, economics, business/management, sociology, education, psychology, and philosophy), articles that have been self-archived freely on the web, thereby maximising access, have been shown to have 50%-250+% greater citation impact than articles that have not been self-archived. Is it reasonable to expect researchers and their institutions and funders to continue to renounce that vast impact potential in an online age that has made this impact-loss no longer necessary? Can asking researchers to keep on losing that impact be seriously described as 'maximising access to research information'? Now let us see on what grounds researchers are being asked to renounce this impact:
ALPSP: "we find ourselves unable to support RCUK's proposed position paper on the means of achieving this. We continue to stress all the points we made in our previous response, dated 19 April, and are insufficiently reassured by RCUK's reply. We are convinced that RCUK's proposed policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals."
If it were indeed true that the RCUK's policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals, then this contingency would definitely be worthy of further time and thought.

But there is in fact no objective evidence whatseover in support of this dire prophecy. All evidence (footnote 1) from 15 years of self-archiving (in some fields having reached 100% self-archiving long ago) is exactly the opposite: that self-archiving and journal publication can and do continue to co-exist peacefully, with institutions continuing to subscribe to the journals they can afford, and researchers at the institutions that can afford them continuing to use them; the only change is that the author's own self-archived final drafts (as well as earlier pre-refereeing preprints) are now accessible to all those researchers whose institutions could not afford the official journal version (as well as to any who may wish to consult the pre-refereeing preprints). In other words, the self-archived author's drafts, pre- and post-refereeing, are supplements to the official journal version, not substitutes for it.

In the absence of any objective evidence at all to the effect that self-archiving reduces subscriptions, let alone destroys journals, and in the face of 15 years' worth of evidence to the contrary, ALPSP simply amplifies the rhetoric, elevating pure speculation to a putative justification for continuing to delay and oppose a policy that is already long overdue and a practice that has already been amply demonstrated to deliver something of immense benefit to research, researchers, their institutions and funders: dramatically enhanced impact. All this, ALPSP recommends, is to be put on hold because some publishers have the 'conviction' that self-archiving will destroy journals.
ALPSP: "A policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as OAI-PMH), will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario."
The objective evidence from 15 years of continuous self-archiving by physicists (even longer by computer scientists) has in fact tested this grim hypothesis; and this cumulative evidence affords not the slightest hint of any move to a 'disastrous scenario.' Throughout the past decade and a half, final drafts of hundreds of thousands of articles have been made freely accessible and readily retrievable by their authors (in some fields approaching 100% of the research published). And these have indeed been extensively accessed and retrieved and used and applied and cited by researchers in those disciplines, exactly as their authors intended (and far more extensively than articles for which the authors' drafts had not been made freely accessible). Yet when asked, both of the large physics learned societies (the Institute of Physics Publishing in the UK and the American Physical Society) responded very explicitly that they could identify no loss of subscriptions to their journals as a result of this critical mass of self-archived and readily retrievable physics articles (footnote 1). The ALPSP's doomsday conviction does not gain in plausibility by merely being repeated, ever louder.

Google Scholar and OAI-PMH do indeed make the self-archived supplements more accessible to their would-be users, but that is the point: The purpose of self-archiving is to maximise access to research information. (Some publishers may still be in the habit of reckoning that research is well-served by access-denial, but the providers of that research -- the researchers themselves, and their funders -- can perhaps be forgiven for reckoning, and acting, otherwise.)
ALPSP: "Librarians will increasingly find that 'good enough' versions of a significant proportion of articles in journals are freely available; in a situation where they lack the funds to purchase all the content their users want [emphasis added] it is inconceivable that they would not seek to save money by cancelling subscriptions to those journals. As a result, those journals will die."
First, please note the implicit premise here: Where research institutions 'lack the funds to purchase all the content their researchers want,' the users (researchers) should do without that content, and the providers (researchers) should do without the usage and impact, rather than just giving it to one another, as the RCUK proposes. And why? Because researchers giving their own research to researchers who cannot afford the journal version will make the journals die.

Second, RCUK-funded researchers publish in thousands of journals all over the world -- the UK, Europe and North America. Their publications, though important, represent the output of only a small fraction of the world's research population. Neither research topics nor research journals have national boundaries. Hence it is unlikely that a 'significant proportion' of the articles in any particular journal will become freely available purely as a consequence of the RCUK policy.

Third, journals die and are born every year, since the advent of journals. Their birth may be because of a new niche, and their demise might be because of the loss or saturation of an old niche, or because the new niche was an illusion. Scholarly fashions, emphases and growth regions also change. This is ordinary intellectual evolution plus market economics.

Fourth (and most important), as we have already noted, physics journals already do contain a 'significant proportion' of articles that have been self-archived in the physics repository, arXiv -- yet librarians have not cancelled subscriptions (footnote 1) despite a decade and a half's opportunity to do so, and the journals continue to survive and thrive. So whereas ALPSP may find it subjectively 'inconceivable,' the objective fact is that self-archiving is not generating cancellations, even where it is most advanced and has been going on the longest.

Research libraries -- none of which can afford to subscribe to all journals, because they have only finite journals budgets -- have always tried to maximise their purchasing power, cancelling journals they think their users need less, and subscribing to journals they think their users need more. As objective indicators, some may use (1) usage statistics (paper and online) and (2) citation impact factors, but the final decision is almost always made on the basis of (3) surveys of their own users' recommendations (footnote 2). Self-archiving does not change this one bit, because self-archiving is not done on a per-journal basis but on a per-article basis. And it is done anarchically, distributed across authors, institutions and disciplines. An RCUK mandate for all RCUK-funded researchers to self-archive all their articles will have no net differential effect on any particular journal one way or the other. Nor will RCUK-mandated self-archiving exhaust the contents of any particular journal. So librarians' money-saving and budget-balancing subscription/cancellation efforts may proceed apace. Journals will continue to be born and to die, as they always did, but with no differential influence from self-archiving.

But let us fast-forward this speculation: The RCUK self-archiving mandate itself is unlikely to result in any individual journal's author-archived supplements rising to anywhere near 100%, but if the RCUK model is followed (as is quite likely) by other nations around the world, we may indeed eventually reach 100% self-archiving for all articles in all journals. That would certainly be optimal for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders. Would it be disastrous for journals? A certain amount of pressure would certainly be taken off librarians' endless struggle to balance their finite journal budgets: The yearly journal selection process would no longer be a struggle for basic survival (as all researchers would have online access to at least the author-self-archived supplements), but market competition would continue among publisher-added-values, which include (1) the paper edition and (2) the official, value-added, online edition (functionally enriched with XML mark-up, citation links, publisher's PDF, etc.). The market for those added values would continue to determine what was subscribed to and what was cancelled, pretty much as it does now, but in a stabler way, without the mounting panic and desperation that struggling with balancing researchers' basic inelastic survival needs has been carrying with it for years now (the 'serials crisis').

If, on the other hand, the day were ever to come when there was no longer a market for the paper edition, and no longer a market for some of the online added-values, then surely the market can be trusted to readjust to that new supply/demand optimum, with publishers continuing to sell whatever added values there is still a demand for. One sure added-value, for example, is peer review. Although journals don't actually perform the peer review (researchers do it for them, for free), they do administer it, with qualified expert editors selecting the referees, adjudicating the referee reports, and ensuring that authors revise as required. It is conceivable that one day that peer review service will be sold as a separate service to authors and their insitutions, with the journal-name just a tag that certifies the outcome, instead of being bundled into a product that is sold to users and their institutions. But that is just a matter of speculation right now, when there is still a healthy demand for both the paper and online editions. Publishing will co-evolve naturally with the evolution of the online medium itself. But what cannot be allowed to happen now is for researchers' impact (and the public's investment and stake in it) to be held hostage to the status quo, under the pretext of forestalling a doomsday scenario that has no evidence to support it and all evidence to date contradicting it.
ALPSP: "The consequences of the destruction of journals' viability are very serious. Not only will it become impossible to support the whole process of quality control, including (but not limited to) peer review"
Notice that the doomsday scenario has simply been taken for granted here, despite the absence of any actual evidence for it, and despite all the existing evidence to the contrary. Because it is being intoned so shrilly and with such 'conviction', it is to be taken at face value, and we are simply to begin our reckoning with accepting it as an unchallenged premise: but that premise is without any objective foundation whatsoever.

As ALPSP mentions peer review, however, is this not the point to remind ourselves that among the many (unquestionable) values that the publisher does add, peer-review is a rather anomalous one, being an unpaid service that researchers themselves are rendering to the publisher gratis (just as they give their articles gratis, without seeking any payment)?

As noted above, peer review and the certification of its outcome could in principle be sold as a separate service to the author-institution, instead of being bundled with a product to the subscriber-institution; hence it is not true that it would be 'impossible to support' peer review even if journals' subscription base were to collapse entirely. But as there is no evidence of any tendency toward a collapse of the subscription base, this is all just hypothetical speculation at this point.
ALPSP: "but in addition, the research community will lose all the other value and prestige which is added, for both author and reader, through inclusion in a highly rated journal with a clearly understood audience and rich online functionality."
Wherever authors and readers value either the paper edition or the rich online functionality -- both provided only by the publisher -- they will continue to subscribe to the journal as long as they can afford it, either personally or through their institutional library. As noted above, this clearly continues to be the case for the physics journals that are the most advanced in testing the waters of self-archiving. Publishers who add sufficient value create a product that the market will pay for (by the definition of supply, demand and sufficient-value). However, surely the interests of research and the public that funds it are not best-served if those researchers (potential users) who happen to be unable to afford the particular journal in which the functionally enriched, value-added version is published are denied access to the basic research finding itself. Even more important and pertinent to the RCUK proposal: The fundee's and funder's research should not be denied the impact potential from all those researchers who cannot afford access.

Researchers have always given away all their findings (to their publishers as well as to all requesters of reprints) so that other researchers could further advance the research by using, applying and building upon their findings. Access-denial has always limited the progress, productivity and impact of science and scholarship. Now the online age has at last made it possible to put an end to this needless access-denial and resultant impact-loss; the RCUK is simply the first to propose systematically applying the natural, optimal, and inevitable remedy to all research output.

Whatever publisher-added value is truly value continues to be of value when it co-exists with author self-archiving. Articles continue to appear in journals, and the enriched functionality of the official value-added online edition (as well as the paper edition) are still there to be purchased. It is just that those who could not afford them previously will no longer be deprived of access to the research findings themselves.
ALPSP: "This in turn will deprive learned societies of an important income stream, without which many will be unable to support their other activities -- such as meetings, bursaries, research funding, public education and patient information -- which are of huge benefit both to their research communities and to the general public."
(Notice, first, that this is all still predicated on the truth of the doomsday conviction -- 'that self-archiving will inevitably destroy journals' -- which is contradicted by all existing evidence.)

But insofar as learned-societies 'other activieties' are concerned, there is a very simple, straight-forward way to put the proposition at issue: Does anyone imagine -- if an either/or choice point were ever actually reached, and the trade-off and costs/benefits were made completely explicit and transparent -- that researchers would knowingly and willingly choose to continue subsidising learned societies' admirable good works -- meetings, bursaries, research funding, public education and patient information -- at the cost of their own lost research impact?

The ALPSP doomsday 'conviction', however, has no basis in evidence, hence there is no either/or choice that needs to be made. All indications to date are that learned societies will continue to publish journals -- adding value and successfully selling that added-value -- in peaceful co-existence with RCUK-mandated self-archiving. But entirely apart from that, ALPSP certainly has no grounds for asking researchers to renounce maximising their own research impact for the sake of financing learned societies' good works (like meetings, bursaries and public education) -- good works that could finance themselves in alternative ways that were not parasitic on research progress, if circumstances were ever to demand it

The ALPSP letter began by stating that the mission of ALPSP publisher members is to 'disseminate and maximise access to research information'. Some of the journal-publishing learned societies do indeed affirm that this is their mission; yet by their restrictive publishing practices they actively contradict it, while defending the resulting inescapable contradiction by pleading a disaster scenario (very like the one ALPSP repeatedly invokes) in the name of protecting the publishing profits that support all of the society's other activities. Yet this is not the attitude of forward-thinking, member-oriented societies that understand properly what researchers in their fields need and know how to deliver it. Here is a quote from Dr Elizabeth Marincola, Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology, a sizeable but not huge society (10,000 members; many US scientific and medical societies have over 100,000 members):
"I think the more dependent societies are on their publications, the farther away they are from the real needs of their members. If they were really doing good work and their members were aware of this, then they wouldn't be so fearful'' When my colleagues come to me and say they couldn't possibly think of putting their publishing revenues at risk, I think 'why haven't you been diversifying your revenue sources all along and why haven't you been diversifying your products all along?' The ASCB offers a diverse range of products so that if publications were at risk financially, we wouldn't lose our membership base because there are lots of other reasons why people are members." (Footnote 3)
This perfectly encapsulates why we should not be too credulous about the dire warnings emanating from learned societies to the effect that self-archiving will damage research and its dissemination. The dissemination of research findings should, as avowed, be a high-priority service for societies -- a direct end in itself, not just a trade activity to generate profit so as to subsidise other activities, at the expense of research itself.
ALPSP: "The damaging effects will not be limited to UK-published journals and UK societies; UK research authors publish their work in the most appropriate journals, irrespective of the journals' country of origin."
The thrust of the above statement is rather unclear: The RCUK-mandated self-archiving itself will indeed be distributed across all journals, worldwide. Hence, if it had indeed been 'damaging', that damage would likewise be distributed (and diluted) across all journals, not concentrated on any particular journal. So what is the point being made here?

But in fact there is no evidence at all that self-archiving is damaging to journals, rather than co-existing peacefully with them; and a great deal of evidence that it is extremely beneficial to research, researchers, their institutions and their funders.
ALPSP: "We absolutely reject unsupported assertions that self-archiving in publicly accessible repositories does not and will not damage journals. Indeed, we are accumulating a growing body of evidence that the opposite is the case [emphasis added], even at this early stage"
We shall now examine whose assertions need to be absolutely rejected as unsupported, and whether there is indeed 'a growing body of evidence that the opposite is the case'.

What follows is the ALPSP's 5 pieces of putative evidence in support of their expressed 'conviction' that self-archiving will damage journals. Please follow carefully, as the first two pieces of evidence [1]-[2] -- concerning usage and citation statistics -- will turn out to be positive evidence rather than negative evidence, and the last three pieces of evidence [3]-[5] -- concerning journals that make all of their own articles free online -- turn out to have nothing whatsoever to do with author self-archiving:
ALPSP: "For example:
[1] Increasingly, librarians are making use of COUNTER-compliant (and therefore comparable) usage statistics to guide their decisions to renew or cancel journals. The Institute of Physics Publishing is therefore concerned to see that article downloads from its site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially replicated in the ArXiV repository than for those which are not."
How does example [1] show that 'the opposite is the case'? As has already been reported above, the Institute of Physics Publishing (UK) and the American Physical Society (US) have both stated publicly that they can identify no loss of subscriptions as a result of nearly 15 years of self-archiving by physicists! (Moreover, publishers and institutional repositories can and will easily work out a collaborative system of pooled usage statistics, all credited to the publisher's official version; so that is no principled obstacle either.)

The easiest thing in the world for Institutional Repositories (IRs) to provide to publishers (along with the link from the self-archived supplement in the IR to the official journal version on the publisher's website -- something that is already dictated by good scholarly practice) is the IR download statistics for the self-archived version of each article. These can be pooled with the download statistics for the official journal version and all of it (rightly) credited to the article itself. Another bonus that the self-archived supplements already provide is enhanced citation impact -- of which it is not only the article, the author, the institution and the funder who are the co-beneficiaries, but also the journal and the publisher, in the form of an enhanced journal impact factor (average citation count). It has also been demonstrated recently that download impact and citation impact are correlated, downloads in the first six months after publication being predictive of citations after 2 years.

All these statistics and benefits are there to be shared between publishers, librarians and research institutions in a cooperative, collaborative atmosphere that welcomes the benefits of self-archiving to research and that works to establish a system that shares them among the interested parties. Collaboration on the sharing of the benefits of self-archiving is what learned societies should be setting up meetings to do -- rather than just trying to delay and oppose what is so obviously a substantial and certain benefit to research, researchers, their institutions and funders, as well as a considerable potential benefit to journals, publishers and libraries. If publishers take an adversarial stance on self-archiving, all they do is deny themselves of its potential benefits (out of the groundless but self-sustaining 'conviction' that self-archiving can inevitably bring them only disaster). Its benefits to research are demonstrated and incontestable, hence will incontestably prevail. (ALPSP's efforts to delay the optimal and inevitable will not redound to learned societies' historic credit; the sooner they drop their filibustering and turn to constructive cooperation and collaboration, the better for all parties concerned.)
ALPSP: "[2] Citation statistics and the resultant impact factors are of enormous importance to authors and their institutions; they also influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. Both the Institute of Physics and the London Mathematical Society are therefore troubled to note an increasing tendency for authors to cite only the repository version of an article, without mentioning the journal in which it was later published."
Librarians' decisions about which journals to renew or cancel take into account a variety of comparative measures, citation statistics being one of them (footnote 2). Self-archiving has now been analysed extensively and shown to increase journal article citations substantially in field after field; so journals carrying self-archived articles will have higher impact factors, and will hence perform better under this measure in competing for their share of libraries' serials budgets. This refutes example [2].

As to the proper citation of the official journal version: This is merely a question of proper scholarly practice, which is evolving and will of course adapt naturally to the new medium; a momentary lag in scholarly rigour is certainly no argument against the practice of self-archiving or its benefits to research and researchers. Moreover, publishers and institutional repositories can and will easily work out a collaborative system of pooled citation and reference statistics -- all credited to the official published version. So that is no principled obstacle either. This is all just a matter of adapting scholarly practices naturally to the new medium (and is likewise inevitable). It borders on the absurd to cite something whose solution is so simple and obvious as serious grounds for preventing research impact from being maximised by universal self-archiving!
ALPSP: "[3] Evidence is also growing that free availability of content has a very rapid negative effect on subscriptions. Oxford University Press made the contents of Nucleic Acids Research freely available online six months after publication; subscription loss was much greater than in related journals where the content was free after a year. The journal became fully Open Access this year, but offered a substantial reduction in the publication charge to those whose libraries maintained a print subscription; however, the drop in subscriptions has been far more marked than was anticipated."
This is a non-sequitur, having nothing to do with self-archiving, one way or the other (as was already pointed out in the prior rebuttal of APLSP's April critique of the RCUK proposal): This example refers to an entire journal's contents -- the official value-added versions, all being made freely accessible, all at once, by the publisher -- not to the anarchic, article-by-article self-archiving of the author's final draft by the author, which is what the RCUK is mandating. This example in fact reinforces what was noted earlier: that RCUK-mandated self-archiving does not single out any individual journal (as OU Press did above with one of its own) and drive its self-archived content to 100%. Self-archiving is distributed randomly across all journals. Since journals compete (somewhat) with one another for their share of each institution's finite journal acquisitions budget, it is conceivable that if one journal gives away 100% of its official, value-added contents online and the others don't, that journal might be making itself more vulnerable to differential cancellation (though not necessarily: there are reported examples of the exact opposite effect too, with the free online version increasing not only visibility, usage and citations, but thereby also increasing subscriptions, serving as an advertisement for the journal). But this is in any case no evidence for cancellation-inducing effects of self-archiving, which involves only the author's final drafts and is not focussed on any one journal but randomly distributed across all journals, leaving them to continue to compete for subscriptions amongst themselves, on the basis of their relative merits, exactly as they did before.
ALPSP: "[4] The BMJ Publishing Group has noted a similar effect; the journals that have been made freely available online on publication have suffered greatly increased subscription attrition, and access controls have had to be imposed to ensure the survival of these titles."
Exactly the same reply as above: The risks of making 100% of one journal's official, value-added contents free online while all other journals are not doing likewise has nothing whatosever to do with anarchic self-archiving, by authors, of the final drafts of their own articles, distributed randomly across journals.
ALPSP: "[5] In the USA, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences found that two of its journals had, without its knowledge, been made freely available on the Web. For one of these, an established journal, they noted a subscriptions decline which was more than twice as steep as the average for their other established journals; for the other, a new journal where subscriptions would normally have been growing, they declined significantly. While the unauthorised free versions have now been removed, it is too early to tell whether the damage is permanent."
Exactly the same artifact as in the prior two cases. (The trouble with self-generated Doomsday Scenarios is that they tend to assume such a grip on the imagination that their propounders cannot distinguish objective evidence from the 'corroboration' that comes from merely begging the question or changing the subject!)

In all three examples, whole journals were made freely available, all at once, in their entirety, along with all the added value and rich online functionality that a journal provides. This is not at all the same as authors self-archiving only their own final drafts (which are simply their basic research reports), and doing so on a single-article (rather than a whole-journal) basis. Yet the latter is all that the RCUK proposes to mandate. Hence examples [3]-[5] are really a misleading conflation of two altogether different matters, creating the illusion of support for what is in fact an untenable conclusion on which they actually have no bearing one way or the other.

[Moreover -- even though it has nothing at all to do with what the RCUK is mandating --if one does elect to look at evidence from whole-journal open access then there are many more examples of journals that have benefited from being made freely available: Molecular Biology of the Cell's subscriptions, for example, have grown steadily after free access was provided by its publisher, The American Society for Cell Biology (footnote 3). That journal also enjoys a high impact factor and healthy submissions by authors, encouraged by the increased exposure their articles receive. The same has happened for journals published by other societies (footnote 4).]
ALPSP: "In addition, it is increasingly clear that this is exactly how researchers are already using search engines such as Scirus and Google Scholar: Greg R. Notess, Reference Librarian, Montana State University, in a recent article in Information Today (Vol 29, No 4) writes 'At this point, my main use of both [Scirus and Google Scholar] is for finding free Web versions of otherwise inaccessible published articles.'"
This is merely a repetition of ALPSP's earlier point about OAI and Google Scholar. Reply: Yes, these wonderful new resources do increase access to the self-archived supplements: but that's the point! To maximise research access, usage and impact.

Other search engines that retrieve free access articles (such as citebase, citeseer and OAIster) likewise serve the research community by enabling any unsubscribed researchers to find and access drafts of articles they could not otherwise use because they are accessible only by subscription. ISI's Web of Knowledge and Elsevier's Scopus, both paid services, find the authors' free versions as well as the journals' subscription-only versions, which researchers can then use whenever they or their institutions can afford subscription, license, or pay-per-view access; Elsevier's Scirus, a free service, likewise retrieves both, as does Google itself (if at least the reference metadata are made web-accessible). All these services do indeed help to maximise access, usage and impact, all to the benefit of the impact of that small proportion of current research that happens to be spontaneously self-archived already (15%). The RCUK mandate will increase this benefit systematically to that remaining 85% of UK research output that is still only accessible today to those who can afford the official journal version.
ALPSP: "'I found a number of full-text articles via Google Scholar that are PDFs downloaded from a publisher site and then posted on another site, free to all.'"
This point, on the other hand, is not about author self-archiving, but about pirating and bootleg of the publisher's official version. RCUK is not mandating or condoning anything like that: The policy pertains only to authors' own final drafts, self-archived by them -- not to the published version poached by 3rd party consumers, which is called theft. (Hence this point is irrelevant.)
ALPSP: "'Both Scirus and Scholar were also useful for finding author-hosted article copies, preprints, e-prints, and other permutations of the same article.'"
Exactly as one would hope they would be, if one hopes to 'maximise access to research'.
ALPSP: "In the light of this growing evidence of serious and irreversible damage, each publisher must have the right to establish the best way of expanding access to its journal content that is compatible with continuing viability."
So far no evidence whatsoever of 'serious and irreversible damage' (or indeed of any damage) caused by author self-archiving has been presented by ALPSP. (This is unsurprising, because in reality no such evidence exists, and all existing evidence is to the contrary.)

Of course publishers can and should do whatever they wish in order to expand access to their journal content and remain viable. But they certainly have no right to prevent researchers, their institutions and their funders from likewise doing whatever they can and wish in order to expand the access to, and the impact of, their own research findings -- nor to expect them to agree to keep waiting passively to see whether their publishers will one day maximise their access and impact for them.

100% self-archiving is already known to be both doable and to enhance research impact substantially; self-archiving has also been co-existing peacefully with journals for over a decade and a half (including in those fields where 100% self-archiving has already been reached) ; 100% self-archiving overall is already well overdue, and years' worth of research impact have already been needlessly lost waiting for it. ALPSP has given no grounds whatsoever for continuing this delay for one moment longer. It has merely aired a doomsday scenario of its own imagination and then adduced 'evidence' in its support that is obviously irrelevant and defeasible.What is certain is that research impact cannot be held hostage to publishers' anxieties, simply on the grounds of their subjective intensity.
ALPSP: "This is not best achieved by mandating the earliest possible self-archiving, and thus forcing the adoption of untried and uncosted publishing practices."
Self-archiving in October 2005 is not 'the earliest possible self-archiving' It is self-archiving that is already at least a decade overdue. And it has nothing to do with untried and uncosted publishing practices: Self-archiving is not a publishing practice at all; it is a researcher practice. And it has been tried and tested -- with great success and great benefits for research progress -- for over 15 years now. What is needed today is more self-archiving -- 100% -- not more delay.

Or does the 'earliest possible' here refer not to when the RCUK self-archiving mandate is at last implemented, but how early the published article should be self-archived? If so, the answer from the point of view of research impact and progress is unambiguous: The final draft should be self-archived and made accessible to all potential users immediately upon acceptance for publication (prefinal preprint drafts even earlier, if the author wishes). No research usage or progress should be held back arbitrarily for 3, 6, 12 or more months, for any reason whatsoever.

It cannot be stressed enough just how crucial it is for RCUK to resist any pressure to impose or allow any sort of access-denial period, of any length, during which unpaid access to research findings would be embargoed -- findings that the RCUK has paid for, with public money, so that they can be immediately reported, used, applied and built upon, for the benefit of the public that paid for it, not so that they can be embargoed, for the benefit of assuaging publishers' subjective fears about 'disaster scenarios' for which there does not exist a shred of objective evidence. Any delay that is allowed amounts to an embargo on research productivity and progress, at the expense of the interests of the tax-paying public. That is exactly what happened recently to the US National Institutes of Health's public access policy, setting US research access and impact back several years.

Fortunately, there is a simple compromise that will completely immunise the RCUK mandate from any possibility of being rendered ineffectual in this way:

What all RCUK-funded researchers should be required to self-archive in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) immediately upon acceptance for publication are:
(1) each article's metadata (author name, date, article title, journal name, etc.).
plus
(2) each article's final draft (full-text)
That fulfills the RCUK requirement. The access-setting, however, can then be given two options:
(OA) Open Access
(both the metadata and the full-text are made freely accessible to everyone webwide)
or
(IA) Institutional Access
(the metadata are freely accessible webwide but the full-text is made accessible only to the fundee's institution, its employees, and its funders, such as the RCUK and RAE, for record-keeping, grant-fulfillment and performance-assessment purposes).
The RCUK fundee is strongly encouraged (but not required) to set access to OA immediately.

As 90% of journals have already given article self-archiving their official green light, 90% of articles can have their access set to OA immediately. For the remaining 10%, the author can set access to IA initially, but of course each article's metadata (author, title, journal, etc.) will immediately be openly accessible webwide to all would-be users, just as the metadata of the OA 90% are. That's enough data so that would-be users can immediately email the author for an 'eprint' (the author's final draft) if they cannot afford to access the journal version. The author can keep emailing eprints to each would-be user until either the remaining 10% of journals update their policy or the author tires of doing all those needless keystrokes and sets articleaccess to OA. In the meanwhile, however, 100% of RCUK-funded research will be immediately accessible webwide, 90% of it directly, and 10% of it with author mediation, maximising its access and impact. Nature can take care of the rest at its leisure.
ALPSP: "It is clearly unrealistic to consult adequately with all those likely to be affected over the summer holiday period, and we therefore urge you to extend the consultation period and to defer, for at least 12 months, the introduction of any mandate for authors to self-archive. In the meantime, we would like to take up RCUK's expressed willingness to engage with both publishers and learned societies, beginning with a meeting in early September with representatives of ALPSP; we propose one of the following dates: 5th September, 6th September, 7th September, 8th September
We look forward to a reply at your earliest convenience.
Yours sincerely
Sally Morris, Chief Executive"
The consultation has been going on since long before 'the summer holiday period' and there has already been far more delay and far more research impact needlessly lost than anyone can possibly justify. Some members of the publishing community are quite leisurely about continuing to prolong this needless loss of research impact and progress in order to continue debating, but the research community itself is not (as indicated, for example, by the ill-fated demand for open access -- by a deadline of September 1, 2001 -- on the part of the 34,000 researchers who signed the PloS petition).

RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving mandate, with no further delay or deferral, and then meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in pooling download and citation statistics, and in other other ways of sharing the benefits of maximising UK research access and impact. Any further pertinent matters and developments can be discussed as well -- but not at the cost of further delaying what is indisputably the optimal and inevitable (and long overdue) outcome for research, researchers, their institutions, and their funders -- and for the public, which funds the research on the understanding that its use and applications are meant to be maximised to benefit the public's interests, not minimised to protect other parties' from imaginary threats to their interests.

(A shorter UK version of this critique -- http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html -- has been co-signed by the following UK senior researchers [in boldface] and sent as hard copy to the recipients of the ALPSP statement. The present longer analysis has also been co-signed by some prominent international supporters of the RCUK initiative.)

Tim Berners-Lee (UK, Southampton & US, MIT)
Dave De Roure (UK, Southampton)
Stevan Harnad (UK, Southampton & Canada, UQaM)
Derek Law (UK, Strathclyde)
Peter Murray-Rust (UK, Cambridge)
Charles Oppenheim (UK, Loughborough)
Nigel Shadbolt (UK, Southampton)
Yorick Wilks (UK, Sheffield)

Subbiah Arunachalam (India, MSRF)
Helene Bosc (France, INRA, ret.)
Fred Friend (UK, University College, London)
Andrew Odlyzko (US, University of Minnesota)
Arthur Sale (Australia, University of Tasmania)
Peter Suber (US, Earlham)

References

1. Swan, A (2004). Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding. American Scientist Open Access Forum: 3 February 2005.

2. Personal communication from a UK University Library Director: 'I know of no HE library where librarians make cancellation or subscription decisions. Typically they say to the department/faculty 'We have to save £X,000" from your share of the serials budget: what do you want to cut?'. These are seen as academic --not metrics-driven -- judgements, and no librarian makes those academic judgements, as they are indefensible in Senate' [S]uch decisions are almost always wholly subjective, not objective, and have nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of repositories.'

3. The society lady: an interview with Elizabeth Marincola. Open Access Now: 6 October 2003

4. Walker, T (2002) Two societies show how to profit by providing free access. Learned Publishing 15: 279-284.

Copies of ALPSP open letter were also sent to:
The Lord Sainsbury of Turville Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Science and Innovation Department of Trade and Industry, Professor Sir Keith O'Nions Director General of Research Councils Office of Science and Technology Dr. Astrid Wissenburg RCUK Secretariat, Professor Colin Blakemore Medical Research Council, Frances Marsden Arts and Humanities Research Council, Professor Julia Goodfellow Biotechnology and Biological Research Council, Professor Richard Wade Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council, Professor Alan Thorpe Natural Environment Research Council, Professor John O'Reilly Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Professor John Wood Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, Andrea Powell Chair of ALPSP Council, (Director of Publishing, CAB International)

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 00:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, August 21. 2005

Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique

Professor Ian Diamond
Chair, RCUK Executive Group
Research Councils UK Secretariat
Polaris House , North Star Ave
Swindon SN2 1ET

Date: 22 August

Dear Professor Diamond,

We are responding to the public letter, addressed to yourself, by Sally Morris (Executive Director of ALPSP, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), concerning the RCUK's proposed research self-archiving policy.

ALPSP says that the RCUK policy would have 'disastrous consequences' for journals, yet all objective evidence is precisely contrary to this dire prediction. In the point-by-point rebuttal attached (below) to this letter, we document this on the basis of the actual data and a careful logical analysis. Here is a summary:

ALPSP argues that a policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as OAI-PMH), "will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario".

The disastrous scenario predicted by ALPSP is that an RCUK mandate would cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, which would in turn lead to the financial failure of scholarly journals, and so to the collapse of the quality control and peer review process that publishers manage.

Not only are these claims unsubstantiated, but all the evidence to date shows the reverse to be true: not only do journals thrive and co-exist alongside author self-archiving, but they can actually benefit from it -- both in terms of more citations and more subscriptions.

Moreover, there is a logical contradiction in the position adopted by ALPSP. On the one hand, ALPSP maintains that learned societies must be allowed to operate in a free market ("each publisher must have the right to establish the best way of expanding access to its journal content that is compatible with continuing viability"). Yet on the other hand, ALPSP is in effect asking RCUK to protect learned societies from the consequences of a free market -- specifically the right of those who have funded and produced research to make their product readily accessible for uptake by its intended users.

What no one denies is that today many researchers are unable to access all the research they need to do their work. As ALPSP itself acknowledges, researchers already have to make use of author self-archived articles in order to gain access to "otherwise inaccessible published articles," since no research institution can afford to subscribe to all the journals its researchers need.

In short, due to the current constraints on the accessibility of research results, the potential of British scholarship is not being maximised currently. Yet the constraints on accessibility can now, in the digital age, be eliminated completely, to the benefit of the UK economy and society, exactly in the way RCUK has proposed.

For this reason, we believe that RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving mandate, without further delay. That done, RCUK can meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in sharing the newfound benefits of maximising UK research access and impact.

(A point-by-point rebuttal is attached below. A longer analysis, signed also by some non-UK supporters, is at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alpsp.doc )

Yours faithfully,

Professor Tim Berners-Lee (University of Southampton)
Professor Dave De Roure (University of Southampton)
Professor Stevan Harnad (University of Southampton)
Professor Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton)
Professor Derek Law (University of Strathclyde)
Dr. Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge)
Professor Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University)
Professor Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield)
Point-by-point rebuttal:
ALPSP: a policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as OAI-PMH), will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario.
This hypothesis has already been tested and the actual evidence affords not the slightest hint of any 'move to a disastrous scenario.' Self-archiving is most advanced in physics, hence that is the strongest test of where it is moving: Since 1991, hundreds of thousands of articles have been made freely accessible and readily retrievable by physicists using the open archive called arXiv; those articles have been extensively accessed, retrieved, used and cited by other researchers -- exactly as their authors intended. Yet when asked, both of the large physics learned societies (the Institute of Physics Publishing in the UK and the American Physical Society) responded very explicitly that they cannot identify any loss of subscriptions to their journals as a result of this critical mass of self-archived and readily retrievable physics articles (footnote 1).
ALPSP: Librarians will increasingly find that 'good enough' versions of a significant proportion of articles in journals are freely available; in a situation where they lack the funds to purchase all the content their users want, it is inconceivable that they would not seek to save money by cancelling subscriptions to those journals. As a result, those journals will die.
First, neither research topics nor research journals have national boundaries. RCUK-funded researchers publish articles in thousands of journals, and those articles represent the output of only a small fraction of the world's research population. It is therefore extremely unlikely that a 'significant proportion' of the articles in any particular journal will become freely available as a consequence of the RCUK policy.

Second, as we know, some physics journals already do contain a 'significant proportion' of articles that have been self-archived in the physics repository, arXiv -- yet librarians have not cancelled subscriptions: the journals continue to survive and thrive.
ALPSP: The consequences of the destruction of journals' viability are very serious. Not only will it become impossible to support the whole process of quality control, including (but not limited to) peer review, but in addition, the research community will lose all the other value and prestige which is added, for both author and reader, through inclusion in a highly rated journal with a clearly understood audience and rich online functionality
Wherever authors and readers value the rich online functionality added by publishers they will still wish to have access to the journal, either through personal subscriptions or through their libraries. This is obviously the case for the physics journals. Publishers who add significant value create a product that users and their institutions will pay for.

Researchers who cannot access the journal version, however -- because their institutions 'lack the funds to purchase all the content their users want' -- should not be denied access to the basic research results, which have always been given away for free by their authors (to their publishers, as well as to all requesters of reprints). Nor should those authors be denied the usage and impact of those users. Such limitations on access have always hampered the impact and progress of British scholarship.
ALPSP: We absolutely reject unsupported assertions that self-archiving in publicly accessible repositories does not and will not damage journals. Indeed, we are accumulating a growing body of evidence that the opposite is the case, even at this early stage.
For example:
[1] Increasingly, librarians are making use of COUNTER-compliant (and therefore comparable) usage statistics to guide their decisions to renew or cancel journals. The Institute of Physics Publishing is therefore concerned to see that article downloads from its site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially replicated in the ArXiV repository than for those which are not.
And what is the evidence supporting the assertion that 'the opposite is the case' and journals are damaged? None. As we know, the Institute of Physics Publishing (like the American Physical Society) has already stated publicly that it cannot identify any loss of subscriptions as a result of 14 years of self-archiving by physicists (footnote 1). Moreover, institutional repository software developers are now working with publishers on ways to ensure that the usage of articles in repositories is credited to the publisher.
ALPSP: [2] Citation statistics and the resultant impact factors are of enormous importance to authors and their institutions; they also influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. Both the Institute of Physics and the London Mathematical Society are therefore troubled to note an increasing tendency for authors to cite only the repository version of an article, without mentioning the journal in which it was later published.
Librarians' decisions to cancel or subscribe to journals are made on the basis of a variety of measures, citation statistics being just one of them (footnote 2). But self-archiving increases citations, so journals carrying self-archived articles will perform better under this measure.

Citing the canonical version of an article wherever possible is a matter of author best-practice; it is misleading to cite momentary lags in scholarliness as if they were an argument against self-archiving. All of this can and will be quite easily and naturally adjusted, partly through updated scholarly practice and partly through institutional and publisher repositories collaborating in a system of pooled and shared citation statistics -- all credited to the official published version, as proper scholarliness dictates. These are all just natural adaptations to the new medium.
ALPSP: [3] Evidence is also growing that free availability of content has a very rapid negative effect on subscriptions. Oxford University Press made the contents of Nucleic Acids Research freely available online six months after publication; subscription loss was much greater than in related journals where the content was free after a year...
[4] The BMJ Publishing Group has noted a similar effect...
[5] In the USA, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences ... made freely available on the Web... noted a subscriptions decline
In all three examples whole journals were made freely available, in their entirety, with all the added value and rich online functionality that a journal provides. This is not at all the same as the self-archiving of authors' drafts, which are simply the basic research results, provided by the author on a single-article basis. The latter, not the former, is the target of the proposed RCUK policy. It is hence highly misleading to cite the effects of the former as evidence of negative effects of the latter.

(And although the RCUK is not proposing to mandate whole-journal open access, it is worth noting that there is also plenty of evidence that journals have benefited from being made freely available: Molecular Biology of the Cell's (MBC's) subscriptions have grown steadily after free access was provided by its publisher, The American Society for Cell Biology (footnote 3). MBC also enjoys a high impact factor and healthy submissions by authors encouraged by the increased exposure their articles receive. The same has happened for journals published by other societies [footnote 4].)
ALPSP: In addition, it is increasingly clear that this is exactly how researchers are already using search engines such as Scirus and Google Scholar... 'At this point, my main use of both [Scirus and Google Scholar] is for finding free Web versions of otherwise inaccessible published articles... Both Scirus and Scholar were also useful for finding author-hosted article copies, preprints, e-prints, and other permutations of the same article.'
Scirus, Google Scholar and the other search engines that retrieve open access articles serve the research community by enabling researchers to find and access articles they would otherwise be unable to read because they are hidden behind subscription barriers. These services help to maximise research access, usage and impact, all to the benefit of British science and scholarship, exactly as their authors and their institutions and funders wish them to do.
ALPSP: In the light of this growing evidence of serious and irreversible damage, each publisher must have the right to establish the best way of expanding access to its journal content that is compatible with continuing viability.
So far no evidence of serious and irreversible damage inflicted by self-archiving has been presented by ALPSP. This is unsurprising, because none exists. Publishers should do what they can to expand access and remain viable. But they certainly have no right to prevent researchers, their institutions and their funders from expanding access to their research findings either -- nor to expect them to wait and see whether their publishers will one day maximise access for them.
ALPSP: This is not best achieved by mandating the earliest possible self-archiving, and thus forcing the adoption of untried and uncosted publishing practices.
Self-archiving -- and what the RCUK is mandating -- is not a publishing practice at all: it is an author practice. And it has been tried and tested -- with great success -- for over 15 years without 'forcing the adoption' of any 'untried and uncosted publishing practices.' What UK research needs now is more self-archiving, not more delay and counterfactual projections.
ALPSP: This in turn will deprive learned societies of an important income stream, without which many will be unable to support their other activities -- such as meetings, bursaries, research funding, public education and patient information -- which are of huge benefit both to their research communities and to the general public.
Please contrast this double-doomsday scenario ('self-archiving will not only destroy journals but all the other good works of learned societies') with the following quote from Dr Elizabeth Marincola, Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology, a sizeable but not huge society (10,000 members; many US scientific and medical societies have over 100,000):
"I think the more dependent societies are on their publications, the farther away they are from the real needs of their members. If they were really doing good work and their members were aware of this, then they wouldn't be so fearful...... When my colleagues come to me and say they couldn't possibly think of putting their publishing revenues at risk, I think 'why haven't you been diversifying your revenue sources all along and why haven't you been diversifying your products all along?' The ASCB offers a diverse range of products so that if publications were at risk financially, we wouldn't lose our membership base because there are lots of other reasons why people are members."3
This perfectly encapsulates why we should not be taking too seriously the dire warnings from those learned societies who warn that self-archiving will damage research and its dissemination. The dissemination of research findings should be a high-priority service for learned societies, but not a commercial end-in-itself that generates profit to subsidise other activities, at the expense of British research itself.

RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving mandate, without any further delay, and then meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in pooling download and citation statistics, and in other other ways of sharing the benefits of maximising UK research access and impact.

References

1. Swan, A (2004). American Scientist Open Access Forum 3 February, 2005

2. Personal communication from a UK University Library Director: 'I know of no HE library where librarians make cancellation or subscription decisions. Typically they say to the department/faculty 'We have to save £X,000" from your share of the serials budget, what do you want to cut?'. These are seen as academic -- not metrics-driven -- judgements, and no librarian makes those academic judgements, as they are indefensible in Senate... [S]uch decisions are almost always wholly subjective, not objective, and have nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of repositories.'

3. The society lady: an interview with Elizabeth Marincola (2003) Open Access Now, October 6, 2003

4. Walker, T (2002) Two societies show how to profit by providing free access. Learned Publishing 15, 279-284.

Copies also sent to:
The Lord Sainsbury of Turville Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Science and Innovation Department of Trade and Industry
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions Director General of Research Councils, Office of Science and Technology
Drs. Astrid Wissenburg, RCUK Secretariat
Professor Colin Blakemore, Medical Research Council
Frances Marsden, Arts and Humanities Research Council
Professor Julia Goodfellow, Biotechnology and Biological Research Council
Professor Richard Wade, Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council
Professor Alan Thorpe, Natural Environment Research Council
Professor John O'Reilly, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Professor John Wood, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils
Andrea Powell, Chair of ALPSP Council (Director of Publishing, CAB International)

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 17:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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