Open Access Archivangelism

From Peter Murray-Rust's blog:

Peter Murray-Rust: "if you post anything [on GOAL] that does not support Green Open Access Stevan Harnad and the Harnadites will publicly shout you down. I have been denigrated on more than one occasion by members of the OA oligarchy (Look at the archive if you need proof). It’s probably fair to say that this attitude has effective killed Open discussion in OA. Jan Velterop and I are probably the only people prepared to challenge opinions = most others walk away."

Mike Taylor: "I don’t bother arguing with Stevan on the principle that you both get dirty but the pig likes it… He’s made himself the People’s Front of Judea."

(many thanks to Andrew Adams for this gem!)

Peter Murray-Rust wrote: "I recently sat through an hour lecture by SH whose subtitle was "What Peter Murray-Rust thinks and why he is wrong". The thoughts attributed to me were factually incorrect."

One of the wonderful things about facts is that sometimes one can actually check them, objectively!

The full video of that lecture -- "How & Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs To Be Revised" -- is online for all to see, along with a PDF containing my written text and all my powerpoints. I would be very interested to hear if anyone finds anywhere either a subtitle "What Peter Murray-Rust thinks and why he is wrong" or anything that even resembles it.

In that lecture, I did make some references to Peter Murray-Rust, his work and his goals, in what I believe was an entirely respectful and complimentary way, praising his contributions and sharing his goal of machine data-mining rights (CC-BY) over all journal articles where it's needed (such as in his field).

The only two points on which I diverged from Peter Murray-Rust were points of strategic priority:

(1) I said that the right to do machine data-mining on journal articles (CC-BY) was even harder to get from publishers than the right to make journal articles freely accessible online (Gratis Green OA), so it would be better to first grasp the Gratis Green OA that is already within reach at no extra cost -- by mandating it -- rather than renounce it in favour of over-reaching instead for what is not yet within immediate reach at no extra cost, as the Finch Report had recommended doing.

(2) And I also said that the Finch/RCUK strategy -- of pre-emptively paying publishers extra (over and above paying subscriptions) for CC-BY Gold OA to UK's 6% of all worldwide research output, in all fields, when very few fields urgently need CC-BY but all fields need free online access -- is not only a waste of money, but it does not even produce what the few fields that need CC-BY require, which is data-mining rights for all the worldwide research output in the field, not just the UK's 6% of it. On the contrary, the pre-emptive payment policy of Finch/RCUK simply makes it harder to get even Gratis Green OA for the rest of the world's research output (94%) (because it is unaffordable, and because it incentivizes publishers' offering hybrid Gold OA and increasing Green OA embargoes).

Now if what Peter Murray-Rust thinks is what BIS/Finch/RCUK think, then I was indeed, inter alia, criticizing what Peter Murray-Rust thinks.

But certainly not under the subtitle "What Peter Murray-Rust thinks and why he is wrong"...

My talk was not about Peter Murray-Rust.

Stevan Harnad

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Some references on "Open Disagreement"

Harnad, S. (1978) Editorial. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1(1)

Harnad, S. (1979) Creative disagreement. The Sciences 19: 18 - 20.

Harnad, Stevan (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science, Technology and Human Values 10: 55-62.

Harnad, S. (1987) Skywriting (unpublished) Since published as Sky-Writing, Or, When Man First Met Troll. The Atlantic, Spring Issue 2011

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

Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4) 283-292.

Harnad, S. (2002) BBS Valedictory Editorial Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(1)

Harnad, S. (2003/2004) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines. Retour a la tradition orale: ecrire dans le ciel a la vitesse de la pensee. Dans: Salaun, Jean-Michel & Vendendorpe, Christian (dir). Les défis de la publication sur le web: hyperlectures, cybertextes et meta-editions. Presses de l'enssib.

Poynder, R. & Harnad S. (2007) From Glottogenesis to the Category Commons. The Basement Interviews.

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

This is a response to a proposal (by some individuals in the researcher community) to raise the goalposts of Green OA self-archiving and Green OA mandates from where they are now (free online access) to CC-BY (free online access plus unlimited re-use and re-publication rights):

1. For the reasons I will try to describe here, raising the goal-posts for Green OA self-archiving and Green OA mandates to CC-BY (free online access PLUS unlimited re-use and re-publication rights) would be very deleterious to Green OA growth, Green OA mandate growth, and hence global OA growth (and would thereby provide yet another triumph for the publisher lobby and double-paid hybrid-Gold CC-BY).

2. The fundamental practical reason why global Green Gratis OA (free online access) is readily reachable is precisely because it requires only free online access and not more.

3. That is also why 60% of journals endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA today.

4. That is also why repositories' Almost-OA Button can tide over user needs during any embargo for the remaining 40% of journals.

5. "Upgrading" Green OA and Green OA mandates to requiring CC-BY would mean that most journals would immediately adopt Green OA embargoes, and their length would be years, not months.

6. It would also mean that emailing (or mailing) eprints would become legally actionable, if the eprint was tagged and treated as CC-BY, thereby doing in a half-century's worth of established scholarly practice.

7. And all because impatient ideology got the better of patient pragmatics and realism, a few fields' urgent need for CC-BY was put ahead of all fields' urgent need for free online access -- and another publisher lobby victory was scored for double-paid hybrid Gold-CC-BY (hence simply prolonging the worldwide status quo of mostly subscription publishing and little OA).

8. If Green OA self-archiving meant CC-BY then any rival publisher would immediately be licensed to free-ride on any subscription journal's content, offering it at cut-rate price in any form, thereby undercutting all chances of the original publisher recouping his costs: Hence for all journal publishers that would amount to either ruin or a forced immediate conversion to Gold CC-BY...

9. ...If publishers allowed Green CC-BY self-archiving by authors, and Green CC-BY mandates by their institutions, without legal action.

10. But of course publishers would not allow the assertion of CC-BY by its authors without legal action (and it is the fear of legal action that motivates the quest for CC-BY!):

11. And the very real threat of legal action facing Green CC-BY self-archiving by authors and Green CC-BY mandates by institutions (unlike the bogus threat of legal action against Gratis Green self-archiving and Gratis Green mandates) would of course put an end to authors' providing Green OA and institutions' mandating Green OA.

12. In theory, funders, unlike institutions, can mandate whatever they like, since they are paying for the research: But if a funder Gold OA mandate like Finch/RCUK's -- that denies fundees the right to publish in any journal that does not offer either Gold CC-BY or Gratis-Green with at most a 6-12 month embargo, and that only allows authors to pick Green if the journal does not offer Gold -- is already doomed to author resentment, resistance and non-compliance, then adding the constraint that any Green must be CC-BY would be to court outright researcher rebellion.

In short, the pre-emptive insistence upon CC-BY OA, if recklessly and irrationally heeded, would bring the (already slow) progress toward OA, and the promise of progress, to a grinding halt.

Finch/RCUK's bias toward paid Gold over cost-free Green was clearly a result of self-interested publisher lobbying. But if it were compounded by a premature and counterproductive insistence on CC-BY for all by a small segment of the researcher community, then the prospects of OA (both Gratis and CC-BY), so fertile if we at last take the realistic, pragmatic course of mandating Gratis Green OA globally first, would become as fallow as they have been for the past two decades, for decades to come.

Some quote/comments follow below:

Jan Velterop: We've always heard, from Stevan Harnad, that the author was the one who intrinsically had copyright on the manuscript version, so could deposit it, as an open access article, in an open repository irrespective of the publisher's views.

I said -- because it's true, and two decades' objective evidence shows it -- that authors can deposit the refereed, final draft with no realistic threat of copyright action from the publisher.

JV: If that is correct, then the author could also attach a CC-BY licence to the manuscript version.

Nothing of the sort. Author self-archiving to provide free online access (Gratis Green OA) is one thing -- claiming and dispensing re-use and republication rights (CC-BY) is quite another.

JV: If it is incorrect, the author can't deposit the manuscript with open access without the explicit permission of the publisher of his final, published version, and the argument advanced for more than a decade by Stevan Harnad is invalid.

Incorrect. Authors can make their refereed final drafts free for all online without the prospect of legal action from the publisher, but not with a CC-BY license to re-use and re-publish.

Moreover, for authors who elect to comply with publisher embargoes on Green Gratis OA, there is the option of depositing in Closed Access and relying on the Almost-OA Button to provide eprint-requesters with individual eprints during the embargo. This likewise does not come with CC-BY rights.

JV: Which is it? I think Stevan was right, and a manuscript can be deposited with open access whether or not the publisher likes it. Whence his U-turn, I don't know

.No U-turn whatsoever. Just never the slightest implication from me that anything more than free online access was intended.

JV: But if he was right at first, and I believe that's the case, that also means that it can be covered by a CC-BY licence. Repositories can't attach the licence, but 'gold' OA publishers can't either. It's always the author, as copyright holder by default. All repositories and OA publishers can do is require it as a condition of acceptance (to be included in the repository or to be published). What the publisher can do if he doesn't like the author making available the manuscript with open access, is apply the Ingelfinger rule or simply refuse to publish the article.

The above is extremely unrealistic and counterproductive policy advice to institutions and funders.

If an OA mandate is gratuitously upgraded to CC-BY it just means that most authors will be unable to get their papers published in their journal of choice if they comply with the mandate. So authors will not comply with the mandate, and the mandate will fail.

Peter Murray-Rust: If we can establish the idea of Green-CC-BY as the norm for deposition in repositories then I would embrace it enthusiastically. I can see no downside other than that some publishers will fight it. But they fight anyway

The downside is that authors won't fight, and hence OA itself will lose the global Gratis Green OA that is fully within its reach, and stay in the non-OA limbo (neither Gratis nor CC-BY, neither Green nor Gold) in which most research still is today -- and has been for two decades.

And the irony is that -- speaking practically rather than ideologically -- the fastest and surest prospect for both CC-BY and Gold is to first quickly reach global Gratis Green OA. Needlessly over-reaching can undermine all of OA's objectives.

PMR: It would resolve all the apparent problems of the Finch reoprt etc. It is only because Green licences are undefined that we have this problem at all.

On the contrary: raising the Gratis Green 6-12 goalposts to immediate Green CC-BY would make the Finch/RCUK a pure hybrid-Gold mandate and nothing else. And its failure would be a resounding one.

PMR: And if we all agreed it could be launched for Open Access Week

That would certainly be a prominent historic epitaph for OA. I hope, on the contrary, that pragmatic voices will be raised during OA week, so that we can get on with reaching for the reachable instead of gratuitously raising the goalposts to unrealistic heights.

Stevan Harnad

In "The Open Access Movement is disorganized; this must not continue," Peter Murray-Rust [PM-R:] wrote:

PM-R: “Stevan Harnad… argues inter alia that gratisOA (e.g. through Green, CC-restricted) rather than libreOA (e.g. through Gold, or CC-BY) should be adopted...”

Actually, I argue that Gratis Green OA rather than Libre OA should be mandated (by researchers’ institutions and funders), because: 

(1) 100% OA is reachable only if we mandate it;

(2) only Green OA self-archiving (not Gold OA publishing) can be mandated; 

(3) all researchers want to provide Gratis OA (free online access); 

(4) not all researchers want to provide Libre OA (free online access plus remix and republication rights);

(5) all disciplines need Gratis OA;

(6) not all disciplines need Libre OA;

(7) Gratis OA is much more urgent than Libre OA;

(8) 100% Gratis OA is already reachable, 100% Libre OA is not;

(9) publisher restrictions are less of an obstacle for Gratis OA; 

(10) mandating Green Gratis OA is not only the fastest, surest and cheapest way to reach 100% Gratis OA but it is also the fastest, surest and cheapest way to reach Gold OA and Libre OA thereafter.

PM-R: “If we restrict ourselves to STM publishing (where almost all of the funders’ efforts are concentrated) there is not a shred of evidence that any author wishes to restrict the re-use of their publications through licenses.”

(a) OA is not just for STM articles: it’s for peer-reviewed research in all disciplines

(b) It is not just funders who are mandating OA but also institutions, for all research, funded and funded, in all disciplines

(c) Ask, and you will find more than a shred of evidence that not all authors (not even all STM authors) want to allow their verbatim texts to be re-mixed and re-published by anyone, without restriction.

(d) What all authors want re-used and re-mixed are their ideas and findings, not their verbatim texts.

(e) STM authors do want their figures and tables to be re-used and re-published, but with Green Gratis OA, that can be done; it is only their verbatim texts that they don’t want tampered with.

PM-R: “Most scientists don’t care about Open Access. (Unfortunate, but we have to change that)”

Most still don’t know about it, and those who do are afraid to provide it, even though it has been demonstrated to be beneficial for them and their research (in terms of uptake, usage, applications, citations, impact, progress).

And that’s just why OA mandates are needed.

PM-R: “Of the ones that care, almost none care aboutdetails. If they are told it is “open Access” and fulfils the funders’ requirements then they will agree to anything. If the publisher has a page labeled “full Open Access – CC-NC – consistent with NIH funding” then they won’t think twice about what the license is.”

What they care about in such cases is not OA, but fulfilling their funders’ (and institution’s) requirements.

That’s why OA needs to be mandated.

Most funders mandate only Gratis Green OA because it has fewer publisher constraints and fewer and shorter embargoes. But the advantage of mandating that the author’s version be made OA is that it makes it easier to give permission to re-use (the author’s version of) the figures and tables.

If consensus can be successfully reached on mandating Libre OA rather than just Gratis OA, all the better. But on no account should there be a delay in adopting a Gratis OA mandate in order to hold out for Libre OA.

Gold OA (whether Gratis or Libre) cannot be mandated, either by funders or institutions, and is hence not an issue. Funders and institutions cannot dictate researchers’ choice of journal; nor can they dictate publishers’ choice of cost-recovery model.

PM-R: “Of the ones who care I have never met a case of a scientist – and I want to restrict the discussion to STM – who wishes to restrict the use of their material through licenses. No author says “You can look at my graph, but I am going to sue you if you reproduce it” (although some publishers, such as Wiley did in the Shelley Batts affair, and presumably still do).”

The discussion of OA cannot be restricted to just STM, any more than it can be restricted to just Chemistry.

Authors, mostly ignorant of OA as well as of rights and licenses, mostly haven’t given any of them much thought.

But I can only repeat, even if they have not yet thought about it, many authors, including STP authors, would not relish giving everyone the right to publish mash-ups of their texts.

Graphs and figures are a different story; authors are happy to have those re-used and re-published in re-mixes by others (with attribution), and, as noted, the fact that the Green Gratis OA version is the author’s final draft rather than the publisher’s proprietary version of record makes this much simpler. (For the graphs in their version-of-record, some publishers might conceivably think of suing for this; but authors certainly would never do it, for their Green Gratis OA versions. So that’s another point in favor of Green Gratis OA.)

PM-R: “the OA movement … Cannot agree on what “open access” means in practice”

They can agree, and they have agreed: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre

PM-R: “the OA movement… Spends (directly or indirectly) large amounts of public money (certainly hundreds of millions of dollars in author-side fees) without changing the balance of the market

The OA movement spends no public money. Perhaps you mean Gold OA journal authors?

And the objective of the OA movement is not “changing the balance of the market.” Its objective is OA – Gratis, and, where needed, Libre.

PM-R: “the OA movement… Has no clear intermediate or end-goals”

The OA movement’s end-goal is Gratis OA (free online access) and, where needed, Libre OA (free online access plus re-use, re-mix re-publish rights).

Where Libre OA is needed, Gratis OA is an intermediate goal.

PM-R: “When I find an Open Source program, I know what I am getting. When I find an Open Access paper I haven’t a clue what I am getting”.

You can be almost 100% sure that what you are getting is the peer-reviewed, final, accepted draft.

And with that, researchers whose institution cannot afford access to the publisher’s version of record would be almost 100% better off than they are now.

And that’s why the first priority is mandating Green Gratis OA self-archiving.

(The disanalogies between Open Access and Open Source are too numerous to itemize.)

PM-R: “When I publish my code as Open Source I can’t make up the rules. I must have a license and it must be approved by OSI”

But OA is about peer-reviewed research, and there it is the refereed and editor that must approve the article.

PM-R: “the OS community cares about what Open Source is, how it is defined, how it is labelled and whether the practice conforms to the requirements…. By contrast the OA community does not care about these things”.

As stated earlier, the OA (advocacy) community knows what OA (Gratis and Libre, Green and Gold) and what their respective “requirements” are.

It is not the OA advocates who don’t care enough about such things; it is, unfortunately, the researcher community: the ones who need to provide the OA content.

And what’s missing isn’t a definition of OA, but OA.

PM-R: ““Open Access” was defined in the Budapest and other declarations”.

And the definition – not etched in stone but evolving  – has been revised and updated: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre

PM-R: “Everyone (including Stevan) would agree that this is now consistent with what is (belatedly) being labelled as OA-libre. Note that Stevan was a signatory to this definition of Open Access”.

I signed and helped draft the first OA definition, but at that time I was not yet aware of nuances whose importance has since become apparent, requiring a revision of the definition.

PM-R: “My immediate concern is that unless we organize the definition, labelling and practice of Open Access we are simply giving OA-opponents or OA-doubters carte blanche to do whatever they like without being brought to account. We are throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars in a wasteful fashion. We are exposing people to legal action because the terms are undefined”.

I’m afraid I’m lost here: Who are “we”? OA advocates? What money are we throwing away? Perhaps you means authors and their funders, spending money on Gold OA that is Gratis rather than Libre? Well, I agree that’s a waste of money, but not because the OA’s Gratis but because Green OA needs to mandated before it makes sense to pay for Gold OA.

PM-R: “If you try to re-use non-libre material because it was labelled “Open Access” you could still end up in court”.

Highly unlikely (especially if you’re re-using graphics from the author’s draft rather than the publisher’s version-of-record).

But if you have access to it at all, you’re already better off than those researchers who do not: And that’s the primary problem OA was defined and designed to fix.

PM-R: “As a UK taxpayer I fund scientists to do medical research (through the MRC). The MRC has decided (rightly) that the results of scientific research should be made Open. But they are not Open according to the BOAI declaration”.

They are Gratis OA (after an embargo period). Once all research is Gratis OA (and immediately upon acceptance for publication), Libre OA’s day will come.

PM-R: “Individuals such as Stevan, Peter Suber, Alma Swan, [have] relatively little coordination and no bargaining power”

True. But we did coordinate on the updating of the definition of OA. And EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) will attempt to guide and coordinate the OA policy-making of universities and research instititions, worldwide.

But OA advocates, individually and collectively, are not the ones with the power to provide OA: the ones with the power to provide it are researchers themselves. And the ones with the power to mandate that they provide it are their institutions and funders.

PM-R: “So my simple proposal is that we need an Open Access Institute

Let’s publish our papers in whatever is the best journal for them, but let’s concentrate on persuading institutions and funders to mandate that we make them Green OA.

I look forward to PM-R’s explanation of why he does not agree.

Peter Murray-Rust, in his valid and important advocacy for data-archiving and data-mining, has been arguing for the advantages of Libre Gold OA (LiGoOA: free online access + re-use rights + publication in a Gold OA journal) over Gratis Green OA (GrGrOA: free online access). I argue that since GrGrOA asks for less, faces fewer obstacles, and is immediately reachable today if mandated, we should not miss that opportunity by trying to over-reach instead directly for LiGoOA, since it is not within reach.

The practical advantages of grasping gratis Green OA before trying to reach Libre Gold OA
Peter Murray-Rust (PMR) misses the main advantages of Gratis Green OA (GrGrOA):

(1) Immediate GrGrOA has far smaller obstacles, being already endorsed by over 60% of journals (including almost all the top journals).

(2) Hence GrGrOA can already provide at least 60% GrGrOA plus 40% almost-OA (with the repository’s automated email-eprint-request button) today.

(3) Hence immediate 60% GrGrOA plus 40% almost-OA can already be mandated.

This contrasts with Libre Gold OA (LiGoOA):

(1') LiGoOA is not yet endorsed by any journal other than the small proportion of LiGoOA that already exist (say, about 10%, and that does not include most of the top journals).

(2') Hence LiGoOA can only provide 10% LiGoOA today.

(3') LiGoOA cannot be mandated (today, or ever).

All the LiGoOA advantages PMR seeks will come, but before we reach LiGoOA we have to reach GrGrOA, and we won’t reach it by over-reaching: GrGrOA will simply inherit LiGoOA’s bigger obstacles.

(And what comes with the territory with GrGrOA is searching, downloading locally, reading, saving locally, data-crunching, printing off; that’s all. But it’s incomparably more than what we have now, without GrGrOA.)

No axioms: Just evidence, logic and pragmatics

PMR: "There is a difference between the size of an obstacle and the number of obstacles. I agree that there is quantitatively more opportunity for self-archiving than LiGo."

And for mandating 100% of it. And that's what OA is about: Reaching 100% OA, at long last.

PMR: "I do not understand the phrase “almost-OA”."

Articles deposited as Closed Access but semi-automatically requestable via the repository's email eprint request Button.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture OnlinePMR: "This figure [ % Gold OA] is growing"But not fast enough. And unlike Green, cannot be accelerated with mandates.

Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers, Open and Shut, 19 June 2011

PMR: "You assert opinions [SH: 'LiGoOA cannot be mandated']

Please describe how (and who) you propose to mandate (i.e. require) LiGoOA, that is, require authors to publish in Libre Gold OA Journals.

PMR: "Another axiom [SH: 'before we reach LiGoOA we have to reach GrGrOA, and we won’t reach it by over-reaching: GrGrOA will simply inherit LiGoOA’s bigger obstacles']"

Please describe how you propose to persuade authors who are not even providing GrGrOA to their articles, published in their journals of choice, for free, to pay instead to publish them in LiGoOA journals. (And then describe how you propose to mandate it, if they demur.)

PMR: "You and I differ as to what is formally allowable [with GrGrOA]"

If it's not "searching, downloading locally, reading, saving locally, data-crunching, printing off" as I said, then what is formally allowable with GrGrOA, by your lights?

Priorities and pragmatics

PMR: "I don’t see why the amount of something alters the rate of growth"

It doesn't. It's just that the rate of growth of Gold OA is way too slow. The current growth rate will not even reach 60% Gold OA before 2026, whereas Green OA mandates have been reaching 60% Green OA within two years of adoption for years now:

Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers, Open and Shut, 19 June 2011

PMR: "Libre costs the reader nothing. Yes, we have a prisoner’s dilemma, or a transition process. I would argue that the final state of full Libre will cost less than the current toll-access. But we are in the land of opinions, not logic."

It is the author who pays for Gold OA, not the reader. And it is the author who provides Gold OA, not the reader. So it is not a Prisoner's Dilemma but an Escher Impossible Figure. Green OA mandates can cure the paralysis for Gratis Green OA, and this is a matter of evidence and logic, not opinion. What's your alternative, for curing paralysis for Libre Gold OA?

PMR: "I would urge funders to insist on Libre content"

Good luck! But reality is that most funders don't even insist on Gratis content yet. Might it not be better to start to try to succeed in urging them to insist on at least that, first?

PMR: "authors to insist on financial support from either funders or their institutions"

If authors want, and can provide Gratis Green OA for free (and don't even bother to do it until/unless mandated), what leverage do they have with their funders (when research funds are already scarce) or with their institutions (whose spare funds are locked into subscriptions) -- even if authors bother to insist at all on what they don't even bother to do themselves for free?

PMR: "libraries cancelling as many toll-journals as possible"

Libraries are already cancelling as many toll journals as possible, but they can't cancel the must-have ones until/unless their institutional users can get access to their contents some other way. That's the Escher Impossible Figure (not a Prisoner's Dilemma). And what will resolve it is mandating Green OA, which, once Green OA is universal, allows the libraries to cancel their subscriptions, releasing the institutional windfall savings to pay for a universal conversion to Gold (and Libre!) OA.

PMR: "development of new and imaginative and lower-cost ways of publishing"

Gold OA publishing -- once all access-provision and archiving (and their costs) have been offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories -- will already reduce the cost of publishing to just the cost of peer review. All it takes to see this is a little imagination (but for that, you have to be able to defer immediate gratification on Libre OA!).

PMR: "Stevan has asserted [SH: 'if we start with an objective of 100% OA… we need to start by backing green OA, which has a clear strategy…. Ultimately we want the same thing, but it’s how we get there, and how quickly… that really matters'] as an axiom for 10 years. I don’t agree. And as important, Gratis OA is no use to me, while continuing to legitimise the ownership of material inappropriately"

But perhaps you'll allow that Gratis OA may be of use to many other would-be users, in many fields -- and that the fields for which Libre OA is more urgent than Gratis OA, if any, may be far fewer…

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

SUMMARY: Free online access to refereed research ("Gratis OA") is already within the global research community's immediate reach, because it can be mandated by research institutions and funders. "Libre OA" (Gratis OA plus various further re-use rights) is not within reach because not all researchers want to allow it, hence it cannot be mandated without allowing author opt-out. Yet global Gratis OA is very likely to encourage authors to go on to provide Libre OA too. The worldwide research community should accordingly grasp what is already within its reach, by mandating Gratis OA, rather than over-reaching for what is not yet within its grasp, delaying the immediate benefits of Gratis OA for research uptake, impact and progress.

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Peter Murray-Rust and I are — and have always been — on the same team. Our disagreements have not been about the ultimate goals, but about the immediate means of reaching those goals. "Gratis OA" is free online access; "Libre OA" is free online access plus various re-use rights. So Gratis OA is a necessary condition for Libre OA: Libre OA is more than Gratis OA, but you cannot have Libre OA without Gratis OA.

But we do not yet have Gratis OA! Less than 20% of yearly refereed research output is OA at all. So the strategic difference between Peter and me is very easy to state and to understand: It is easier to ask researchers, institutions and funders for less than it is to ask them for more, especially when most are not yet providing the less, let alone the more.

How can researchers be induced to provide at least Gratis OA? Their institutions and funders can mandate that they self-archive their refereed final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication. That is Green, Gratis OA. Making journals OA (Gold OA) is in the hands of the publishing community, not the researcher community, hence Gold OA — whether Gratis or Libre — cannot be mandated; only Green OA can be mandated. Moreover, Green, Gratis OA mandates are in far less conflict with either the policies of most publishers or the desires of most authors.

Hence (by my lights) the overwhelming priority today for those who seek OA worldwide should be to see to it that Green, Gratis OA mandates are adopted by institutions and funders worldwide. The rest — Libre OA and Gold OA — will eventually come, once we have mandated universal Green, Gratis OA. But not even Green, Gratis OA will come if we needlessly over-reach now, and insist on more, when we do not even have less.

As we approach universal Green, Gratis OA mandates worldwide, search and harvesting will become incomparably more powerful than it is now. (It is already very powerful now, with Google Scholar, Citeseerx and other new search engines, despite the sparseness of the OA content base (<20%). As OA content becomes less sparse, harvesting and search will become all the more sophisticated and powerful, and the "global bibliography" Peter recommends will assemble across the global network of distributed in institutional OA repositories of its own accord, part of the repository deposit procedure and tagging. The problem today is content, not search.)

As to Peter's concern about the right to re-use figures in Gratis OA articles: It is already possible (and easy) to write a java or perl script today that will call up a figure embedded in a Gratis OA document. Instead of literally reproducing the figure in another work, as in the Gutenberg era (which required permission), the online era allows us to embed a pointer URL that has virtually the same effect -- mediated by one click by the user, to get to the locus of the figure in the Gratis OA article.

As to other Libre OA uses (e.g., data-mining): Those researchers today who (for some reason I find rather difficult to fathom) feel they need advance statements, formal and explicit, of their "harvesting rights" (when everyone else today is happily crawling and harvesting the entirety of web gratis content with impunity) will have to wait patiently until we have Gratis OA; once we have mandated it, Gratis OA's own benefits and potential will induce more and more researchers to seek and provide Libre OA, formally. Over-reaching by asking for more today, when most researchers are not yet even providing Gratis OA, nor being mandated to provide Gratis OA, will not motivate them to provide Libre OA.

In closing, I would like to remind everyone that we are just beginning to think of freeing research from the constraints of the Gutenberg era of Closed Access; throughout the Gutenberg era 100% of research was (and 80% of it still is) neither Gratis nor Libre. In print days, you could not even access a paper if your institution did not have a subscription to the journal in which it was published (and if you did access it, all you could do was read it, and use the information -- not re-use, re-mix, or re-publish the text or figures). The online era made it possible for researchers to make their papers accessible to all potential users, not just those whose institutions subscribed to the journal in which it was published. The further idea of various re-use rights — (and note that there are a number of different levels or degrees of potential re-use rights, all the way to making the document public-domain) — was not even thinkable prior to the online era, when we did not even have Gratis OA — because of the inescapable economic constraints of the Gutenberg medium.

So if Libre OA feels urgent now, it is only because the online era has made Gratis OA possible. But before we try to reach the farther possibility, surely we should first seize the benefits of the nearer possibility that the online era has already opened up for us (free online access), for that is a proximal goal that we already have within our grasp the tried, tested and effective practical means of reaching (Green Gratis OA mandates by research institutions and funders), rather than continuing to ask for more — without any tried, tested and effective means of getting it.

Peter could perhaps cite the possibility of adopting stronger Green OA mandates — copyright reservation mandates like Harvard's (about which I am sceptical, because of their opt-out clauses) — but Peter is sceptical about mandates in general (whereas I am only sceptical about mandates that needlessly raise the goal-posts while mandates themselves are still sparse worldwide and successful consensus on adopting them is still slow to reach).

The practical question to be asked of anyone who is desirous of immediate Libre OA rather than Gratis OA is hence this: How do you propose to persuade researchers to provide it?

Stevan Harnad

EnablingOpenScholarship

[Forwarding from SPARC via Peter Suber's SPARC OA Forum. Also see the PDF edition.]

An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress
Signed by 33 Nobel Prize Winners
September 9th, 2008

Dear Members of Congress:

As scientists and Nobel Laureates we are writing today to support the NIH Public Access Policy that was instituted earlier this year as a Congressional mandate. This is one of the most important public access initiatives ever undertaken. Finally, scientists, physicians, health care workers, libraries, students, researchers and thousands of academic institutions and companies will have access to the published work of scientists who have been supported by NIH.

For scientists working at the cutting edge of knowledge, it is essential that they have unhindered access to the world's scientific literature. Increasingly, scientists and researchers at all but the most well-financed universities are finding it difficult to pay the escalating costs of subscriptions to the journals that provide their life blood. A major result of the NIH public access initiative is that increasing amounts of scientific knowledge are being made freely available to those who need to use it and through the internet the dissemination of that knowledge is now facile.

The clientele for this knowledge are not just an esoteric group of university scientists and researchers who are pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. Increasingly, high school students preparing for their science fairs need access to this material so that they too can feel the thrill of research. Teachers preparing courses also need access to the most up-to-date science to augment the inevitably out-of-date textbooks. Most importantly, the lay public wants to know about research findings that may be pertinent to their own health diagnoses and treatment modalities.

The scientific literature is our communal heritage. It has been assembled by the painstaking work of hundreds of thousands of research scientists and the results are essential to the pursuit of science. The research breakthroughs that can lead to new treatments for disease, to better diagnostics or to innovative industrial applications depend completely on access not just to specialized literature, but rather to the complete published literature. A small finding in one field combined with a second finding in some completely unrelated field often triggers that "Eureka" moment that leads to a groundbreaking scientific advance. Public access makes this possible.

The current move by the publishers is wrong. The NIH came through with an enlightened policy that serves the best interest of science, the scientists who practice it, the students who read about it and the taxpayers who pay for it. The legislators who mandated this policy should be applauded and any attempts to weaken or reverse this policy should be halted.

Name, Category of Nobel Prize Awarded, Year

David Baltimore, Physiology or Medicine, 1975
Paul Berg, Chemistry, 1980
Michael Bishop, Physiology or Medicine, 1989
Gunter Blobel, Physiology or Medicine, 1999
Paul Boyer, Chemistry, 1997
Sydney Brenner, Physiology or Medicine, 2002
Mario Cappechi, Physiology or Medicine, 2007
Thomas Cech, Chemistry, 1989
Stanley Cohen, Physiology or Medicine, 1986
Robert Curl, Chemistry, 1996
Johann Deisenhofer, Chemistry, 1988
John Fenn, Chemistry, 2002
Edmond Fischer, Physiology or Medicine, 1992
Paul Greengard, Physiology or Medicine, 2000
Roger Guillemin, Physiology or Medicine, 1977
Leland Hartwell, Physiology or Medicine, 2001
Dudley Herschbach, Chemistry, 1986
Roald Hoffman, Chemistry, 1981
H. Robert Horvitz, Physiology or Medicine, 2002
Roger Kornberg, Chemistry, 2006
Harold Kroto, Chemistry, 1996
Roderick MacKinnon, Chemistry, 2003
Craig Mello, Physiology or Medicine, 2006
Kary Mullis, Chemistry, 1993
Joseph Murray, Physiology or Medicine, 1990
Marshall Nirenberg, Physiology or Medicine, 1968
Paul Nurse, Physiology or Medicine, 2001
Stanley Prusiner, Physiology or Medicine, 1997
Richard Roberts, Physiology or Medicine, 1993
Susumu Tonegawa, Physiology or Medicine, 1987
Hamilton Smith, Physiology or Medicine, 1978
Harold Varmus, Physiology or Medicine, 1989
James Watson, Physiology or Medicine, 1962

Press Contact:
Sir Richard Roberts
(Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,1993)
Tel: (978) 380-7405
Fax: (978) 380-7406
Email: roberts -- neb.com

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SUMMARY: OA1 is Free Access and OA2 is Licensed Re-Use. Green OA self-archiving by authors, mandated by their universities or funders, can in principle provide OA1 or OA2, for either articles or data or both. However, it would be difficult, resisted by many authors, and probably unjust for universities to mandate Green OA1 for data or to mandate Green OA2 for either articles or data. (Funders are in a position to mandate more.)
    Researchers may not want to make their data either freely accessible/useable or re-usable, and they may not want to make their articles freely re-useable. However, all researchers, without exception, want their articles freely accessible/usable (OA1).
    This is the reason Green OA1 mandates are the highest priority. Authors all want Green OA1 and they report that they will comply, willingly (see Swan studies) and actually do comply (see Sale studies) with Green OA1 mandates from their universities and funders to self-archive their articles.
    Moreover, OA1 for articles prepares the way and is likely to lead to OA1 and OA2 for data, as well as to some OA2 for articles.
    That is why Green OA1 self-archiving and Green OA1 self-archiving mandates should be assigned priority.
    Peter Murray-Rust, who is concerned exclusively with OA2 (re-useability) for both articles and data, persistently misunderstands much of this.

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Peter Murray-Rust continues to misunderstand, and hence misrepresent OA. The picture is a lot simpler than Peter makes it sound. Here's a simple glossary:

1. Research Data vs. Research Articles:

Data: Research generates raw data.
Articles: Research generates journal articles describing, analyzing and interpreting the raw data.
Data in Articles: Sometimes articles don't just describe but actually contain raw data.
Articles as Data: Sometimes the articles themselves are treated as data.

2. OA1 (Free Access) vs OA2 (Free Re-Use):

OA1: Articles made accessible/useable free online for users who do not have subscription access to the journal in which they are published.
OA2: Articles or data made accessible/useable free online with various kinds of re-use licenses.

(There is only one OA1 but there are several degrees of OA2, depending on which re-uses are licensed.)

3. The Green vs. Gold Roads to OA:

Green OA: Authors make their articles and/or their data OA1 or OA2 by self-archiving them online.
Gold OA: Journals make their articles OA1 or OA2.

Green OA self-archiving by authors, mandated by their universities or funders, can in principle provide OA1 or OA2, for either articles or data or both. However, it would be difficult, resisted by many authors, and probably unjust for universities to mandate Green OA1 for data or to mandate Green OA2 for either articles or data. (Funders are in a position to mandate more.)

Researchers may not want to make their data either freely accessible/useable or re-usable, and they may not want to make their articles freely re-useable. However, all researchers, without exception, want their articles freely accessible/usable (OA1).

This is the reason Green OA1 mandates are the highest priority. Authors all want Green OA1 and they report that they will comply, willingly (see Swan studies) and actually do comply (see Sale studies) with Green OA1 mandates from their universities and funders to self-archive their articles.

Moreover, OA1 for articles prepares the way and is likely to lead to OA1 and OA2 for data, as well as to some OA2 for articles.

That is why Green OA1 self-archiving and Green OA1 self-archiving mandates should be assigned priority.

Peter Murray-Rust, who is concerned exclusively with OA2 (re-useability) for both articles and data, persistently misunderstands much of this, especially the practical causal path and its attendant priorities.

Here are the kinds of misunderstandings that keep recurring in Peter's discussion of Green OA1 [translations are provided in brackets]:

PMR: "Green Open Access [OA1 to articles] is irrelevant to Open Data [OA1 or OA2 to data] (I think it makes it harder, others disagree)."

No, OA1 to articles is not irrelevant, either to OA1 to articles or data, or to OA2 (licensed re-use rights) to articles and data. Nor does OA1 make it harder to achieve OA2 (for articles or data). But it would certainly make it harder to achieve Green OA1 for articles through Green OA1 mandates if we tried pre-emptively to insist on OA2 instead, or first.

PMR: "There is no explicit mention in the GreenOA upload model [Green OA1 to articles] for items other than the “full-text” [data]."

There is no "GreenOA upload model" but there is Green OA1 self-archiving of articles, and Green OA1 mandates to self-archive articles. Data and OA2 can certainly be mentioned in these mandates, but they cannot be mandated (because not all authors wish to provide OA1 to their data, or OA2 to their articles or data, whereas all authors wish to provide OA1 to their articles (even if it needs to be mandated to get them to actually do it!).

PMR: "The primary goal of Stevan Harnad - expressed frequently to me and others - is that we should strive for 100% GOA [mandated Green OA1 to articles]compliance and that discussions on Open Data, licences and other matters [OA2 to articles, OA1 or OA2 to data] are a distraction and are harmful to the GOA process."

What is distracting and harmful for getting consensus and compliance on Green OA1 mandates, hence for getting OA1 to articles, is not the discussion of OA2 or of data, but the suggestion that it is not enough to mandate OA1 to articles. The time to insist on more than Green OA1 mandates is when Green OA1 is already faithfully mandated and provided, not before Green OA1 mandates have prevailed.

PMR: "if Open Data [OA2 to data] is irrelevant or inimical to GOA [OA1 to articles] then it is hard to see GOA [OA1 to articles] as supportive of Open Data [OA2 to data]."

Pre-emptive insistence on OA2 to data (or articles) is inimical to achieving consensus and compliance on mandating OA1 to articles. Achieving OA1 to articles will certainly facilitate going on to achieve OA1 and OA2 to data as well as achieving some OA2 to articles.

PMR: "my main argument is that lack of support for Open Data in GOA [OA2 to data and articles] is potentially harmful to the Open Data movement [OA2 to data and articles]. Let’s assume that Stevan’s approach succeeds and we get 100% of papers in repositories through University mandates, funders et. al... [This] GOA [mandated OA1 to articles] will encourage the deposition of full-text only [articles, not data]"

Green OA1 mandates can encourage OA1 to data and OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but they cannot mandate them, because all authors want OA1 for their articles but not all authors want OA1 for their data or OA2 for their articles and data. And pre-emptively insisting on more will only result in getting less (i.e., less consensus and compliance on OA1 for articles).

PMR: "So my major concern is that GreenOA [OA1 to articles] will lead to substandard processes for publishing scientific data. I’d be happy to find Repositories that insist on data upload [OA1 to data]."

I would be happy if we had 100% OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but I know of no realistic way to achieve that, and certainly not directly, because it is not the case that 100% of authors want it already, in principle. But 100% of authors do want OA1 to their articles already, in principle, and they can and do provide that OA1 it in practice if it is mandated.

I find it hard to imagine that the universal practice of providing OA1 to articles can fail to strengthen the inclination to provide OA1 and OA2 to data and articles as well. On the other hand, it is easy to see how insisting pre-emptively on the latter could prevent even the former from coming into universal practice.

PMR: "a GreenOA paper [OA1] may often be a cut-down, impoverished, version of what is available - for a price - on the publishers website. It may, and usually will, lack the supporting information (supplemental data). It will probably not reproduce any permissions that the publisher actually allows. So - if we concern ourselves with matters other than human eyeballs and fulltext - it is almost certainly a poorer resource than the one on the publisher site."

This point is truly perplexing. What is available on a (non-OA) publisher's website is not even OA1, so what is the point of talking about OA1's impoverishment to those would-be users who are not rich enough to afford the publisher's version?

And, yes, OA1 (free online access/use) is not OA2 (free online access/use and re-use licenses, to either article or data), because not all authors wish to provide OA2 to their articles or data, and Green OA1 mandates hence do not attempt to mandate it.

However, data too can certainly be self-archived in Institutional Repositories (IRs) if the author wishes, and IRs have the metadata tags for specifying re-use rights (OA2), if any, for all deposited articles and data.

PMR: "Many funders... require ultra-strong-OA for their archival... [OA2 to articles and data] And several [Gold OA2] publishers... also insist on CC-BY [OA2 to articles]. This is, of course, great for scientific data [OA2 to data]. But it’s a long way from GreenOA [OA1 to articles]."

Yes, some funders can and do mandate more than OA1 to articles. He who pays the piper calls the tune -- so funders are in a better position to do this than universities are (and funders do not need authors' consensus or consent, as universities do, for the conditions they attach to receiving research funding). But so far that funder-mandated OA2 applies only to articles (and usually only after an embargo period), not to data (although funders could in principle mandate data self-archiving too, and eventually will, I hope).

What Gold OA publishers provide is another matter; the OA1 problem is the problem of the 90% of journals that are non-OA, not the 10% that are OA. (Moreover, most Gold OA journals, too, provide only OA1, as Peter Suber has pointed out, not OA2.)

PMR: "Even if the IRs contained all the data appropriate to the publications how do we discover it?"

If authors self-archive their data, the IRs allow them both to link the data with the corresponding articles and to specify the re-uses licensed.

PMR: "GreenOA [OA1] is designed to be simple. Stevan Harnad argues that it can be accomplished with 'one-click'."

No, it is not OA1 self-archiving that is one-click, it is almost-OA via the "Fair Use" Button -- for deposits that are not Open Access (OA1) Closed Access.

The deposit of the full-text itself takes under six minutes' worth of keystrokes, as described in

Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) A Longitudinal Study of the Practice of Self-Archiving.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Peter Murray-Rust: “Most chemistry publishing is closed access, not even allowing Green self-archiving (unless paid for). There is no sign that any of the major closed publishers (ACS, RSC, Wiley, Springer, Elsevier, Nature) are likely to change in the immediate future.”

Peter Murray-Rust is quite right that ACS is likely to be the very last of all publishers to go Green on OA self-archiving, but he is mistaken about most of the others on his list:

ACS: gray
RSC: GREEN
Wiley: GREEN
Springer: GREEN
Elsevier: GREEN
Nature: pale-green

PM-R: "Thanks Stevan. I am happy to be corrected on Wiley, Springer and Elsevier. I seem to remember that the RSC announced it was Green ca. 2 years ago. That got into Romeo but then they said they weren’t green after all and it was a mistake.

"I am also not really clear any more what pale-green is. I assume “gray” means neither gold nor green."

(1) Pale-green means the publisher endorses the self-archiving of the author’s draft but not the final refereed postprint (though often what the publisher really means by the postprint is the publisher’s PDF).

The difference between the author’s penultimate draft and the final, refereed draft is of course a purely notional one, and no faintly coherent case for the distinction could ever be made in a court of law. So although some superstitious authors make a distinction between pale-green publishers and green publishers, of course there is in reality no substantive difference: Both have given their blessing to the self-archiving of the author’s final draft.

(Gray does indeed mean neither Gold nor Green. But Gold OA publishers are of course, a fortiori, also Green. So the only relevant distinction at issue is Green vs. not-Green.)

(2) The RSC has some right royal double-talk in its contracts. They say they endorse self-archiving on the author’s “personal website”, but not the author’s “institutional repository”:

“When the author signs the exclusive Licence to Publish for a journal article, he/she retains certain rights that may be exercised without reference to the RSC. He/she may…

Photocopy the article and distribute such photocopies and distribute copies of the PDF… for personal or professional use only, provided that any such copies are not offered for sale…

Adapt the article and reproduce adaptations of the article for any purpose other than the commercial exploitation of a work similar to the original…

Make available the PDF of the article mentioned above via the personal website(s) of the author(s)…

This is of course arbitrary gibberish, and again only for the credulous and the superstitious. All RSC authors can self-archive their final drafts in their own IRs with perfect impunity. A “personal website” is merely a disk sector label. For the pedant, the university can (as Southampton ECS has done since 2002) formally declare an author’s IR disk sector to be the author’s “personal website”:

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

In a few years we will be giggling shame-facedly at the stuff and nonsense that kept (most of) us from going ahead and doing the optimal, inevitable and obvious for so long.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

[Update: See new definition of "Weak" and "Strong" OA, 29/4/2008]

The arch-analyst of apertivity, Richard Poynder, has published yet another excellent interview, this time time with Peter Murray-Rust, a dedicated advocate of Open Data (OD).

Here are a few comments on some important differences between Open Access (OA) and Open Data (OD).

The explicit, primary target content of OA is the full-texts of all the articles published in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. This is a special case, among all texts, partly because (i) research depends critically on access to those journal articles, because (ii) journals are expensive, because (iii) authors don't seek or get revenue from the sale of their articles, and hence have always given them away to any would-be user, and because (iv) lost access means lost research impact.

Research data are also critical to research progress, of course, but the universal practice of publishing research findings in refereed journal articles has not extended to the publication of the raw data on which the articles are based. There have been two main reasons for this. One was the capacity of the paper medium: There was no affordable way that data could be published alongside articles in paper journals. The other was that not all authors wanted to publish their data, or at least not right away: They wanted the chance to fully data-mine the data they had themselves gathered, before making it available for data-mining by other researchers.

The online era has now made it possible to publish all data affordably online. That removed the first barrier (although there are still technical problems, which Peter Murray-Rust and others discuss and are working to overcome). But the question of whether and when an author makes his data open is still a matter for the author to decide. Perhaps it ought not to be the author's choice -- but that is a much bigger and more complicated question than OA (for in OA all authors already want to make their published articles freely accessible online).

That difference in scope and universality is one of the reasons the OA and OD movements are distinct ones: OD has both technical and political problems that OA does not have, and it is important that OA should not be slowed down by inheriting these extraneous problems -- just as it is important that OD should not be weighed down by the publisher copyright problems of OA (which do not apply to OD for the simple reason that the authors do not publish their data, hence do not transfer copyright to a publisher).

So far, this is all simple and transparent: OA and OD have different target contents, with different problems to contend with. OA's solution has been for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate the self-archiving of all of OA's target content, making it free for all online. But an interesting overlap region is thereby created between OA and OD: for article texts are themselves data! And one of the most important purposes for which the OD movement has sought to make data freely available online -- apart from the purpose of making it available for collaboration and use by all researchers -- is data-mining, by individuals as well as by software, and for re-publication in further 3rd-party online databases. Data-mining can be done not only on raw research data, but on article texts too, treating them as data: text-mining.

Here too, the interests of OA and OD are perfectly compatible and complementary -- except for one thing: If text-minability and 3rd-party re-publication were indeed to be made part of the definition of OA (i.e., not just removing price barriers to access by making research free for all online, but also "removing permissions barriers" by renegotiating copyright) then this would at the same time radically raise the barriers to achieving OA itself (just as insisting on making the paper edition free would), making it contingent on authors' willingness and success in renegotiating copyright with their publishers.

The online medium itself had been the critical new factor that had made it possible to remove price barriers to access, by making research articles toll-free online. But the price for going on to insist on the removal of both price barriers and "permissions barriers" jointly, as part of the very definition of OA, would have been to raise the problem of overcoming permissions barriers as a barrier to overcoming price barriers! For the new online medium that made toll-free online access possible, did not, in and of itself, redefine copyright, any more than it redefined ownership of the paper edition.

Toll-free online access (OA) will lead to copyright reform (and publishing reform, and perhaps eventually also to the demise of the paper edition). But the online medium alone, in and of itself, simply made toll-free online access possible -- and that is hence the proper definition of OA. (After all, copyright retention by authors was perfectly possible in the paper era. In and of itself, it is not an online matter at all -- although the online medium, and OA itself, will eventually lead to it.)

Peter Murray-Rust is right that there was some naivete about some of this at the time of the drafting of the BOAI definition of OA (which I signed, even though I later opted for an updated definition of OA, one that resolved this ambiguity in favor of immediate OA and its capacity to grow). More than naivete, there was ignorance and lack of foresight, both about the technical possibilities and about the practical obstacles. It was the online medium that had made OA possible: Toll-free access for all users had not been possible or even thinkable in the paper era, either to articles or to data, for both economic and practical reasons. But with the advent of the online era, toll-free access online became thinkable, and possible. Indeed it was already within reach: The only thing authors had to do was to make their articles and data accessible free for all, online.

But most article authors did not make their articles freely accessible online -- even though they all, without exception, sought no income from them their sale, wanting them only to be used, applied, cited and built upon. Most authors remained paralyzed because (1) they were worried about copyright and because (2) they didn't know how to provide OA, imagining that it might require a lot of time and effort.

The solution was Green OA self-archiving mandates on the part of their universities and funders, as an extension of their already existing publish-or-perish mandate. In particular, the IDOA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) Mandate requires researchers to deposit their articles in their Institutional Repositories (IRs) immediately upon publication (with access temporarily set to Closed Access for those journals that impose an access embargo period).

The IDOA solution works for OA -- it provides immediate OA for all the articles that are published in the 62% of journals that already endorse immediate OA. And for the 38% that do not, the articles are deposited as Closed Access; the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button then provides users with almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period.

But this solution does not work for OD, because (a) depositing data cannot be mandated, it can only be encouraged and because (b) making article-texts re-usable by 3rd-party text-miners and re-publishers as data requires permission from the copyright holder. That is not part of IDOA, and the "email eprint request" button does not cover it either.

So the strategic issue is whether to insist on something stronger than IDOA -- at the risk of not reaching consensus on any mandate at all -- or waiting patiently a little while longer, to allow IDOA mandates to become universal, generating toll-free online access (OA), with its immediate resultant benefits to research and researchers -- and to trust that the pressure exerted by those very benefits will lead to the demise of embargoes as well as to OD (for both data and texts) in due course.

I would accordingly urge patience on the part of the OD community, as well as to the Gold OA (publishing) and copyright-reform communities (even though I am by no means patient by nature myself!). Their day will come soon too!

But first, please allow Green OA to take the natural course that is now wide open for it, paving the way with universal IDOA mandates generating toll-free online access to research, and all its immediate benefits. The strategic course to take now is to allow those mandates to propagate globally. This is not the time for over-reaching, raising the ante for OA higher than what the mandates can provide, and thereby only jeopardizing their chances of being adopted in the first place.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint. Nature started out being Green, but then back-slid to pale-Green in 2005, introducing a 6-month embargo on self-archiving. But the ACS (American Chemical Society) is Gray. Rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM, ACS is the only Gray publisher to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green!
    Chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. The surest and fastest antidote for ACS's grayness, however, is for universities and research funders to adopt the Immediate-Deposit (ID/OA) Mandate, which allows a Closed Access Embargo, but requires deposit of the postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication (allowing the Institutional Repository's semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" or "Fair Use" Button to provide almost-OA almost-immediately, to tide over any embargo period).

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[Identity Deleted]: "At the AAAS 2007 meeting held in San Francisco, Tony Hey, in his presentation to a panel chaired by Christine Borgman, made the point that some form of open access to text and data would be the norm in about ten years from now. Ironically, AAAS [along with ACS] is among the few leading professional societies which opposes open access tooth and nail! What can we do to convince the AAAS management (as well as the ACS management) to see the point that is obvious to us? Some believe that AAAS opposes OA while commercial publishers such as Nature Group supports OA in some form..."

AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint; hence there is nothing we need to convince AAAS of!

(Indeed, it is Nature that back-slid to pale-Green in 2005: Nature started out being Green, but then introduced a 6-month embargo on self-archiving coinciding with the announcement that the NIH agreed had agreed to embargoes.)

But it is ACS (American Chemical Society) that is Gray.

And although it is a good idea to keep trying to convince them, my own guess is that ACS will be among the very last of the publishers to go Green. ACS was rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM. (The other two were rumored to be Elsevier, which is fully Green, and Wiley, which is Pale-Green).

ACS is the Learned Society with the biggest and most remunerative publishing operation. With Chemical Abstracts they make a lot more money than the American Physical Society (APS), which was the very first of the Green publishers, and which set the standard for all the rest.

The strongest weapon against the ACS's Gray policy is the movement for data-archiving. (The two strongest contingents of the movement for data-archiving are in Biology and in Chemistry; I have branched this to Peter Murray-Rust, Jeremy Frey, and Michael Hursthouse.)

The chemical research community, accustomed to the status quo, with Chemical Abstracts and the other ACS products and services, is one of the most quiescent on the movement to provide OA to journal articles, but they can be roused on the subject of data-archiving.

And, ironically, ACS is also the most vulnerable there: Other publishers, since they do not publish data, have no big stake in data-archiving, one way or another. But for ACS, data-archiving (just like article-archiving) represents (or appears to them to represent) a risk to their revenue-streams.

So chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. And in chemistry, of all fields, the two are very closely coupled, since many chemical publications (e.g. in crystallography) consist of just the description of a new molecule. See:

(1) Southampton Crystal Structure Report Archive/EPSRC
(2) Mineralogical Society of America/NSF
(3) RRUF/NSF
(4) NCL in Pune (theses)
(5) Elsevier's somewhat half-hearted (because ambivalent) "Chemistry Preprint Server"

So NSF is a potential ally in influencing the ACS. So too would be NIH (if it weren't the victim of ACS's successful anti-OA lobbying at the moment); and the UK's EPSRC (which is obviously conflicted on this issue, being the last of the UK funding councils to still hold out as non-Green!)

One last point: Please do not confuse a publisher's stand on Gold OA (publishing) with their stand on Green OA (self-archiving). Gold OA is welcome, but it is Green OA that is urgently needed. In this regard, AAAS (Green) is fully on the side of the Angels, whereas Nature (Pale-Green) is not.

The only two differences between AAAS and Nature are that (1) AAAS is still (nominally) supporting the "Ingelfinger Rule" on prepublication preprints (but that is not a legal matter, and those authors who wish to ignore the unjustified and unenforceable Ingelfinger Rule can ignore it). and (2) Nature has begun to experiment with Gold. This experimentation can be cynical and self-serving, but it is not, I think, in the case of Nature.

In the case of ACS, however, which has begun to "experiment" with the Trojan Horse of "AuthorChoice," it has become the only Gray publisher, as far as I know, to have the temerity to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green!

In my opinion, there is nothing to reproach AAAS with. I'd be somewhat more inclined to shame Nature, with its 6-month embargo, but the best solution for that is to adopt the Immediate-Deposit Mandate (ID/OA), which allows a Closed Access Embargo, but requires deposit of the postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication (allowing the Institutional Repository's semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" or "Fair Use" Button to provide almost-OA almost-immediately, to tide over any embargo period).

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Alma Swan replied:

Alma Swan: "There is no need to shame Nature because those who think self-archiving is worth doing, do it despite Nature's embargo, as I showed by my little study on Nature Physics: see "Author compliance with publisher open access embargoes: a study of the journal Nature Physics."
"The important action point is what it always has been - get through to authors and their bosses and persuade them of the benefits and rationale for OA. Turn them all into physicists, in other words."

I agree completely with Alma: It is, and always has been, perfectly possibly -- and practised -- to go ahead and self-archive with impunity, sensibly ignoring all the formal nonsense about only being allowed to post on "a Windows-based personal website on Tuesdays if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle"! Those who elect to self-archive spontaneously are sensible enough to know that the "permissions barriers" are in reality all just so much unenforceable Wizard-of-Ozzery.

But the fact remains that only about 15% of researchers elect to self-archive spontaneously! That is why the mandates are needed. And whereas rightly dismissing the posturing of publishers as mere Wizard-of-Ozzery is an easy option for individual authors, already inclined to self-archive spontaneously (as generations of Green self-archiving computer-scientists and physicists and others have by now amply demonstrated), it is not an easy option for most institutions and funding agencies contemplating the adoption of formal self-archiving mandates. They must adopt a policy that is not only practically feasible, but also formally legal. (Even there, I don't think the institutions are at any real risk, but they are at a perceived risk.)

That is why -- despite being in possession of her strong, welcome, and compelling evidence on how many Nature authors do self-archive immediately indifferent to Nature's shameful 6-month embargo -- Alma is a co-author of the optimal institutional (and funder) self-archiving policy, which recommends (if you cannot agree on the stronger version, which is to require immediate deposit and immediate, unembargoed Open Access) a weaker compromise, namely, the ID/OA mandate: require immediate deposit, but merely encourage immediate OA -- allowing the option of a Closed Access embargo period for the likes of Nature authors):

"[drafted collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement]"

So, yes, the embargoes are a paper tiger, but we still have to offer a formal policy option that treats their appearance of being real as if it were really real, and can be adopted universally without any worry about illegality, or even the appearance of illegality)!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum