Introduction:
This article is a critique of:
The "Green" and "Gold" Roads to Open Access:
The Case for Mixing and Matching
Jean-Claude Guédon
Serials Review
30(4) 2004
Open Access (OA) means: free online access to
all
peer-reviewed journal articles.
Jean-Claude Guedon
(J-CG)
argues against the efficacy of author self-archiving of peer-reviewed
journal
articles -- the "Green" road to OA -- on the grounds (1) that
far too few authors self-archive, (2) that self-archiving can only
generate
incomplete and inconvenient access, and (3) that maximizing access and
impact
is the wrong reason for seeking OA (and only favors elite authors).
J-CG suggests
instead that the right reason for seeking OA is so as to reform the
journal
publishing system by converting it to OA ("Gold") publishing (in which
the
online version of all articles is free to all users). He proposes
converting to
Gold by "mixing and matching" Green and Gold as follows:
First, self-archive dissertations (not published, peer-reviewed journal
articles). Second,
identify and tag how those dissertations have been evaluated and
reviewed.
Third, self-archive unrefereed preprints (not published, peer-reviewed journal
articles). Fourth,
develop new mechanisms for evaluating and reviewing those unrefereed
preprints,
at multiple levels. The result will be OA Publishing (Gold).
I reply that this is not mixing and matching
but merely
imagining: a rather vague conjecture about how to convert to 100% Gold,
involving no real Green at all along the way, because Green is the
self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed articles, not just dissertations and preprints.
I argue that rather than yet another 10 years
of
speculation
http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml
what is actually needed (and imminent) is for
OA
self-archiving to be mandated by research funders and institutions so
that the
self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed journal articles (Green) can be fast-forwarded to 100% OA.
The direct
purpose of OA is to maximize research access and impact, not to reform
journal
publishing; and OA's direct benefits are not just for elite authors but
for all
researchers, for their institutions, for their funders, for the
tax-payers who
fund their funders, and for the progress and productivity of research
itself.
There is a complementarity between the Green
and Gold
strategies for reaching 100% OA today, just as there is a
complementarity
between access to the OA and non-OA versions of the same non-OA
articles today.
Whether 100% Green OA will or will not eventually lead to 100% Gold,
however,
is a hypothetical question that is best deferred until we have first
reached
100% OA, which is a direct, practical, reachable and far more urgent
immediate
goal -- and the optimal, inevitable and natural outcome for research in
the
PostGutenberg Galaxy.
Critique:
All highlighted
quotes are from J-CG's
article (for full context
see http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/mixcritcont.htm):
"Recent
discussions on Open Access (OA) have tended to
treat OA journals and self-archiving as two distinct routes"
From the day it was coined in 2001 by the
Budapest Open
Access Initiative (BOAI),
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
"Open Access" has always been defined
as free online access, reachable by two distinct routes, BOAI-1, OA
self-archiving ("Green") and BOAI-2, OA journals ("Gold"):
To
achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two
complementary strategies.
I. Self-Archiving: First, scholars need
the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in
open
electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When
these
archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative,
then
search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one.
Users
then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in
order to
find and make use of their contents.
II.
Open-access Journals:
Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals
committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to
make the
transition to open access. Because journal articles should be
disseminated as
widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright
to
restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they
will use
copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the
articles they
publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will
not
charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for
covering
their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this
purpose,
including the foundations and governments that fund research, the
universities
and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by
discipline or
institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale
of
add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or
cancellation of
journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even
contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to
favor one of
these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no
need to stop
looking for other, creative alternatives.
Open access to
peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a
new
generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this
goal.
"Some...
even suggest that [self-archiving] alone can bring
about full Open Access to the world's scientific literature"
OA's focus is only on peer-reviewed journal
articles --
2.5 million annual articles in 24,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and
scientific
journals --- not on "the world's scientific literature" in its entirety
[i.e.,
not books, magazines]).
(1) To self-archive one's own article is to
provide Open
Access (OA) to one's own article. Every author can do this, for every
one of
his articles. If/when every author does this, for each of the annual
2.5
million articles, we have, by definition, 'full Open Access' (Green).
(2) By the same token, if/when every publisher
of each of
the 24,000 journals converts to OA publishing, we have, by definition,
'full
Open Access' (Gold).
The rest is simply a question of probability:
Is it more
probable that all or most journals will convert to OA, or that all or
most of
their authors will self-archive their articles? Which faces more
obstacles,
costs, delay, uncertainty, risk? Which requires more steps? Which can
be
facilitated by university and research-funder OA mandates? Which is
already
within immediate reach?
"[S]elf-archiving
is not enough... the repositories [need]
some branding ability"
Self-archiving is not enough for what? Would
100%
self-archiving not correspond to 100% OA (just as 100% OA journals
would)?
And as we are talking about the self-archiving
of
peer-reviewed, published journal articles, why is there a need for
"branding"?
Branding what? The journal articles? But those are already branded -- with the name of the journal
that
published them. What is missing and needed is not branding but Open Access to those journal articles! (J-CG's
preoccupation with branding will
turn out to be a consequence of the fact that he is not proposing a way
to make
current journal articles OA, but a way to replace current journals
altogether.)
"[Providing
branding ability to the self-archiving
repositories] will eventually bring about the creation of overlay (or
database)
journals"
It is very easy to imagine how OA journals (and
indeed
non-OA journals) might one day evolve into mere "overlays" on their OA
articles, which are all self-archived in OA Archives by their authors.
The OA
journal could provide the peer-review service, and certify its outcome
with the "brand, " namely, its journal-name.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2
But right now, this is merely a speculation
about what
could possibly happen, some day. Today, only 5% of journals are OA
journals,
providing 5% OA; and 15% OA is provided by author-self-archiving of
articles
published in non-OA journals. And 0.01% of journals (whether OA or
non-OA) are "overlay journals. "
What is accordingly needed today is 100% OA --
not "branding", nor conjectures about how journals might somehow, some
day, evolve
into "overlay" journals.
The notion that the self-archiving of
published, "branded" journal articles to make them OA is somehow not
"full OA" -- because it
lacks "branding" and awaits "overlay journals" -- represents a rather
profound
misunderstanding of both self-archiving and OA.
"Historically,
Open Access (OA) emerged largely as a
reaction to the fast increasing prices of scholarly and scientific
journals"
Historically, the journal pricing/affordability problem drew attention to the access/impact problem, but OA itself certainly was not a reaction to the journal pricing/affordability problem. The first ones to provide OA (long before 'OA' was defined, and long before OA journals existed) were researchers themselves, self-archiving their articles as a reaction to the new possibilities opened up by the Internet. Two prominent early cases of OA self-archiving are well known -- physics (300,000 papers to date) http://arxiv.org/ and computer science (500,000 papers to date) http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs -- but in fact there is now evidence that a good deal of self-archiving has been going on for at least a decade now in just about all disciplines:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
All this OA self-archiving has been going on as
a natural
reaction to the access/impact problem by researchers -- most of them
not even
aware of the pricing/affordability problem, although there is a causal
connection, of course. (If the online version of all journals were
affordable
to all research institutions, then there would be no access/impact
problem, and
hence no need for OA self-archiving.) But it is not true that OA
self-archiving
emerged as a reaction to the fast increasing prices of scholarly and
scientific
journals. It emerged as a reaction to the obvious potential of the Web
to
maximize the access to and the impact of research findings.
"The
concern, first expressed by librarians, was that the
high prices of journals obviously limited access by economic means...
issues of
access have [since] been increasingly distinguished from issues of
costs (or
affordability)"
Librarians were the first to draw attention to
the
pricing/affordability problem, but the access/impact problem was
already felt
by researchers, and they were already doing something about it, on
their own
initiative, thanks to the advent of the Net and Web.
(It was in fact the library community that
implicitly
mixed up the affordability and access problems, especially in the OA
context,
and these are only lately beginning to be unmixed, at last.)
"In
parallel, Open Access has been increasingly focusing
on articles [rather than just] journals... [partly because] scientists
as readers
tend to pay more attention to articles"
Users have always focused on articles, not
journals. The
OA movement has been increasingly re-focusing on article self-archiving, having
temporarily forgotten it. The
research (author) community has not only not forgotten article
self-archiving,
but has been doing it, not only in parallel with the OA movement, but
well
before it, and with no explicit focus on journal affordability. It just
has not
been doing enough of it yet.
"digital
publishing maintains the journal titles mainly
for branding reasons"
It is very difficult to put a comprehensible
construal on
the foregoing sentence:
'Digital publishing'? What sort of entity is
that?
(Journal publishers? They publish both paper and online editions of
their
journals.)
Maintaining journal titles for branding
reasons? What
does that mean? Journals publish journals, and their journals have names, and their authors and users recognize
those names
and their associated track records (and impact factors), and use them
in
deciding which journal to publish in and which journal-articles to
read. The
service provided by the journal includes peer review, publishing
(online and
on-paper), dissemination, and (to an extent) archiving (of the online
version).
What has this to do with the proposition that
'digital
publishing maintains the journal titles mainly for branding reasons'?
(This is
in fact the first sign of a speculation that J-CG will be making later
in his
paper, about a hypothetical day when journals will become mere
"overlays" of
some kind.)
"the
bundling strategies used by several major publishers
tend to rest about equally on number of titles and number of articles"
Researchers focus on access to articles because
it is
articles that they write, publish, read, use and cite. This has next to
nothing
to do with publishers' bundling strategies. Nor does OA.
"in
Budapest... 2001... two approaches [to OA were
described]: First...Open Access journals... Second, 'self-archiv[ing]'"
(There is a minor historical error here: OA
journal
publishing (BOAI-2, "Gold") was not the first of the BOAI routes to OA
but the
second. OA self-archiving of articles published in non-OA journals
(BOAI-1, "Green") was the first.)
"[OA
journal publishing] amounts to a reform of the
existing publication system [relying] on journals as its basic unit...
and... aims at converting [to] or creating... Open Access journals."
Both
OA
self-archiving and OA journal publishing (and indeed, OA itself, and
the
definition of OA) "fundamentally rely on journals as [their] basic
unit"
because it is the articles in peer-reviewed journals that are the
target literature
of the OA movement.
It is true, however, that only BOAI-2, OA
journal
publication (Gold), aims at a reform of the existing publication
system.
BOAI-1, OA self-archiving (Green), is neutral about that.
It aims only at OA.
"[S]pirited
debates have... centered on the viability
of the "author pays" model"
Unfortunately, these spirited debates, centered
on the
viability of OA Publishing (BOAI-2, Gold), have been both perceived and
portrayed as debates on the viability of OA itself, at a considerable
cost in
lost time and lost OA (for having all but forgotten
about BOAI-1, OA self-archiving,
Green).
There has been a plus side to this
disproportionate focus
on OA publishing: it has drawn a good deal of attention to OA,
especially among
those who are more interested in economic problems and iniquities. But
I am not
sure that this plus altogether compensates for the minus, which is that
this
disproportionate focus on OA publishing has not generated very much OA.
Instead, it has drawn attention and energy away from OA self-archiving,
which
has the immediate potential to generate 100% OA virtually overnight,
institutional OA archives being incomparably cheaper, faster and easier
to
create than OA journals. During all that "spirited debate" about the
viability
of the "author pays" model we could instead have been informing authors
that
they themselves can provide this OA they purport to want and need so
much -- by
simply self-archiving their own published articles.
But perhaps the spirited debate on the
viability of
BOAI-2 was needed for everyone to come to realize in the end
that it is BOAI-1 that is in
the
immediate position to provide 100% OA, and hence needs to be mandated
by
research institutions and funders.
"[F]inancial
viability [of OA publishing] rests on
the will of governments ... and varies... with... country and
circumstances"
All the new and converted OA journals are
valuable and
welcome, but their numbers and the rate of increase of their numbers
has to be
realistically noted: About 5% of journals are OA ("Gold") journals
today
(1400/24,000). In contrast, about 93% of journals are "Green" -- i.e.,
they have
given their authors the Green light to self-archive their articles if
they
wish. The rate of increase in the number of Green journals has been
incomparably faster than the rate of increase in the number of Gold
journals in
the past few years. The amount of OA (15%) generated via self-archiving
has
also been three times as great as the amount of OA generated via OA
publishing
(5%); and (although direct measures have not yet been made) it is
likely that
the rate of growth of OA via OA self-archiving is also considerably
higher than
the rate of growth of OA via OA publishing -- for obvious reasons that
have
already been mentioned: It is far easier and cheaper to create and fill
an
institutional OA Archive than to create and fill an OA journal.
Moreover, there
is a considerable financial risk for an established journal in
converting to
the OA cost-recovery model, which
has not yet been tested long enough to know whether it is sustainable
and
scaleable.
So whereas all new and converted OA journals
are welcome,
it makes no sense to keep waiting for or focusing on them as the main
source of
OA. The real under-utilized resource is OA self-archiving --
underutilized even
though it already provides three times as much OA as OA journals and is
probably growing faster too: because OA self-archiving is already in a
position
to provide immediate 100% OA, if only it is given more of our time,
attention
and energy.
It is unrealistic to imagine that the reason the number of new and converted
gold
journals is not growing faster is that governments are not willing to
subsidize
them! It is not clear whether governments should even want to subsidize them,
at
this point, when OA is already reachable without any need for subsidy, via
self-archiving, and researchers are simply not yet ready to perform the few
keystrokes required to reach for it (even for the 93% of their articles
published in
green journals) despite being alleged to want and need OA, despite being
willing (in
their tens of thousands!) to perform the keystrokes to demand it from their
publishers --
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3061.html -- and
despite the fact that the benefits of OA itself are intended mainly for
researchers
and research.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
If government intervention is needed on behalf
of OA,
surely it is needed in order to induce their researchers to provide the
OA that
is already within their reach to provide, rather than to subsidize
journals to
do it for them.
"[In]
the United States, such governmental
intervention may sometimes seem problematic especially from the
perspective of
the publishing business"
If OA is a desirable enough thing, and
reachable,
government should certainly intervene to see that it is reached, if it
can.
Making government funding available to pay the costs of publishing in
OA
journals is fine, but that cannot generate much immediate OA (5%). In
contrast,
mandating self-archiving can generate 93% immediate OA at the very
least! Hence
it is not clear why we keep indulging in this "spirited debate" on
governments
subsidizing OA publishing costs when governments could be generating at
least
93% immediate OA by simply mandating self-archiving (for
government-funded
research).
And that is exactly what the US and UK
self-archiving
mandates have proposed to do: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
"Deceptively
simple to describe...the
"self-archiving" strategy appears much more complicated and subtle
when approached conceptually"
I will try to show that self-archiving is
exactly as
simple as it purports to be, and that what confuses the picture is
merely the
unnecessary complications introduced by speculating (gratuitously) about the need for
reforming the
publishing system (instead of concentrating on the non-speculative need
for
providing OA).
"[OA
self-archiving] both relies on, and forgets about,
journals"
As will now be demonstrated, it is not OA
self-archiving
that forgets that OA self-archiving is the self-archiving of
peer-reviewed
articles published in non-OA journals: Rather, it is those who
speculate about
the ultimate need for a conversion to OA publishing who keep forgetting
that OA
self-archiving is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles
published in
non-OA journals.
"[For
self-archiving] the article [is the] fundamental
unit [and] journals matter only to differentiate between peer-reviewed
articles
and non-peer-reviewed publications and to provide symbolic value"
Symbolic value?
Consider how much simpler and more straight-forward it is to state this
theory-independently: Today, most
of the 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 peer
reviewed
journals are inaccessible to many of their potential users because they
cannot
afford access. If the articles are made accessible free online (by
self-archiving them), this problem is solved.
I need not theorize about why users want to use peer-reviewed journal
articles. I
can take that as a rather obvious premise. Yes, users want the
peer-reviewed
articles (and the journal's name tells them which ones those are); and
peer
review itself provides the 'value' they seek in an expert-vetted
literature rather
than an unfiltered free-for-all. There is no need to debate the value
of peer
review in an OA context: One of the premises of the OA movement is that OA is about
access to the
peer-reviewed journal literature, not access to something else. So
peer-review
and the journal-names come with the territory. The only problem to
solve is access. And
Open Access solves that. And self-archiving is
by far the fastest and surest way to provide immediate OA.
No further theorizing, or complicating, is
needed: We have
peer-reviewed journal articles, but we don't have Open Access to them.
Self-archiving them provides that access. End of story. The rest is
merely
speculation (needless speculation, needless complication), needlessly
delaying
OA.
"If
I archive an article published in Cell, it still
benefits from the Cell branding effect... [which is also] associated
with... [its]
impact factor"
But what is the point being made here? Of
course my
purpose in self-archiving my Cell
article (Cell is a
Green journal,
by the way) is to add
to (1) the
impact I already get from having successfully published it in Cell and thereby successfully reached those
potential
users who can afford
access to Cell, (2)
the further impact
that I would otherwise have lost, from all those would-be users
who cannot read, use
and cite my Cell
article because they (their institutions, actually) cannot afford to access it.
Why all this theorizing about 'branding'
effects? Cell is the name
("brand") of the journal. Cell has built up, across the years, a
track-record for
selectively publishing articles of a certain quality level (by
applying, across
the years, peer-review standards of a certain quality level). So the
reason
authors prefer to publish their articles in Cell (rather than a lower-quality journal, or
no journal
at all) is to meet, and show they meet, Cell's established quality-standards. And the
reason
users prefer to use articles published in Cell (rather than a lower-quality journal, or
no journal
at all) is because they prefer to devote their limited reading time to
reading -- and to risk their limited research time in using and trying
to build upon --
articles published in Cell
(rather than a lower-quality journal, or no journal at all).
Nothing changes with self-archiving, except
that access,
and hence impact, are maximized -- for the same articles, in the same
journals.
"journals
are useful mainly to the researcher-as-author;
the author-as-reader... cares mainly about articles and pays attention
to
journals only... to help guide... reading choices. 'Self-archiving'
consequently proceeds in parallel to, and largely independently from,
journals.
It acts 'as a supplement to toll access' and not as a substitute"
I cannot follow this argument, and I suspect
that one
must be in the grip of some theory in order to see any point here: The
journal,
which provides the peer-review and certifies its outcome as having met
its
established quality standards, performs exactly the same kind of
function for
both the author and the user! It tags the work as having met a known
quality
standard. The author chooses in which journal to (try to) publish his
article
on the basis of the journal's quality track-record, and the user
chooses which
article to read and use on the basis of the journal's quality
track-record.
Hence the self-archived version of the article
is
precisely as described above: a supplement
to the toll-access version, for those who cannot afford to access it,
not a substitute for
it (for those who can). This is only unsettling
for someone who is in thrall to a theory to the effect that what
researchers
really want and need is a substitute!
This is just one step away from declaring that OA itself is in fact
not enough: What we really want
and need is
OA publishing. And that
would
come rather close to undermining the entire case for OA, making it a
mere
accessory to a hypothesis about the optimal publishing system, rather
than an
end in itself.
("Not enough for what?" one is inclined to ask?
Was Open
Access meant to provide Open Access or something else -- like a
solution to the
pricing/affordability problem, perhaps? and/or a reform of journal
publishing?
The right reply is: Hypotheses non Fingo!
Open Access was meant
to provide Open
Access!)
"journals
might become (negatively) relevant again only
when and if they implement policies that make 'self-archiving'
difficult or even impossible"
I am not sure what is meant here, but I suspect
it is
something like: "If Green journals had not become Green, or if they
changed
their minds..." This is again a counterfactual speculation. One can of
course
counter-speculate that if publishers had not given self-archiving the
Green
light, authors could have, and would have, self-archived anyway.
Fifteen
percent had been doing it already, some since the early '90s. But I
think it is
far more sensible (and more productive of OA) to leave off speculating
and
counter-speculating and instead get to work actually generating the OA
that is
within reach.
As to publishers changing their minds about
giving
self-archiving the Green light: It was difficult enough, in the light
of the
demonstrated benefits that self-archiving confers on both authors and
users
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
(i.e., on researchers and research), for publishers not to give it the
Green
light today (and 93% have done so already) http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html
. As OA grows (and is mandated) it
will only become more difficult
not to
give it the Green light, let alone try to withdraw the Green light:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32.Poisoned
"'self-archiving'
is a strategy that has been designed
by researchers and for researchers, with little interest for any other
player
involved in scientific publishing"
But really, isn't the content of the 24,000 peer-reviewed research
journals -- the
annual 2.5 million articles -- mostly research conducted and reported
by
researchers for users (mostly again researchers) who wish to use, apply
and
cite it? Other "players" do play a role in this too. (Publishers add
value;
librarians provide valuable service.) But doesn't the purpose of Open
Access to
this research output concern mainly its providers and users (including
their
institutions and funders), rather than other 'players'?
"[Self-archiving]
simply aims at improving the research
impact of established scientists and little else"
This is dead wrong (and startlingly so!). The
purpose of
self-archiving is to maximize every user's access and every
author's impact! Why on earth
would one imagine that the benefits of
OA would be reserved for "established scientists" alone? If anything,
maximizing impact and access stands to benefit less-established
researchers
even more than more-established ones!
"If
[self-archiving] should help (or hurt) other
categories or people, so be it, but it is neither its concern nor its
worry. It
is a tough-minded vision, narrowly focused on scientific communication.
Supporters of this vision are essentially interested in only one thing:
extracting every ounce of impact a published article may hope to claim"
And the above is a rather tough verdict -- but
without
giving even a clue of a clue as to who would be hurt by maximizing access and impact through
OA
self-archiving!
Having pointed out that all authors and users
benefit,
who are the "players" who lose? Publishers? There is no evidence of
that, just
speculation (for which there is equally plausible counter-speculation
that the
system can adapt naturally if the need should ever arise). Librarians?
How? In
not providing them with a solution to the pricing/affordability
problem? But we
cannot solve all problems at once. World hunger continues too, and is
more
pressing. Moreover, one would think that library budgetary problems
could only
become less pressing, not
more-so, in a
100% self-archiving world, where the supplementary OA version is
available to
all as a safety-net.
"the
"Gold" and "Green" strategies
are generally treated as parallel approaches by both sides... little
attention
has been paid to the ways in which they might relate to one another"
The reason little attention is paid to how
Green and Gold
might relate and interact is that this calls for speculation, and the
non-speculative facts are in far more urgent need of action. We need to
promote
both OA self-archiving and OA journal publishing (but in proportion to
their
capacities to deliver immediate OA, which are currently about 95 to 5,
respectively).
One can speculate on the possible, eventual
interaction
between Green and Gold (and I confess I too have in the past done so);
but
speculating is not an optimal use of time when OA has been within reach
for a
decade http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html -- a decade that we have instead spent mostly
speculating!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm
"the
"Green" side [has] suggest[ed] that [Green
and Gold] might be in some form of competition"
This requires some corrective context: What has
actually
happened is that the Gold side has for several years been receiving
most of the
attention, even though Gold can only deliver 5% immediate OA, and even
though
proponents of Gold tend to completely ignore the Green option -- to the
point of
speaking about and arguing for OA as if OA were synonymous with OA
publishing
(Gold)! It is in this context -- but particularly because Green has the
(unexploited and overlooked) power to generate immediate 95% OA that it
has
become necessary for the advocates of Green to compete for attention
with the
proponents of Gold! Competing for attention has required pointing out
quite
explicitly that devoting more attention and energy to Gold than to
Green,
instead of in proportion to their respective power to deliver immediate
OA, is
in fact disserving the interests of OA (because it is!).
"Treating
the "Green" and "Gold"
approaches as separate and in competition... is not
useful...,potentially divisive
and could ultimately weaken the Open Access movement"
The two approaches are in competition for
whatever time,
resources and energy we have to devote to OA. So far, that time,
resources and
energy have not been invested in Green and Gold in proportion to their
respective capacity for providing a return on the investments -- i.e.,
their
capacity for delivering immediate OA. That
is not useful (for OA); and efforts to redistribute the available time,
resources and energy stand to benefit OA. What could weaken the OA
movement is
failure to make progress toward OA, or needlessly heading in an
inertial
direction that can deliver far less OA than the alternative direction.
I think
the evidence and arguments for the respective probabilities and
powers of
Green and Gold need to be pointed out, rather than suppressed in an
effort to
preserve an ecumenism (and one-sidedness) that is far from optimal for
OA.
"Rather
than favoring one approach exclusively at the
expense of the other, Open Access promoters should design better
strategies by
making use of both approaches simultaneously"
That sounds constructive, but it does seem to
imply that
the status quo is that Green is being favored at the expense of Gold,
whereas
the reality is quite the reverse: that Gold has been vastly favored at
the
expense of Green, for several years now! And Green is currently working
to
readjust the overall energy investment so it is more in proportion with
each
approach's immediate capacity to deliver OA.
"Stevan
Harnad... summarizes the [Science and Technology
Committee] recommendations as follows:
1.
Mandate author-institution self-archiving of all
UK-funded research output (and fund and support the practice, as needed)
2.
Fund author-institution costs of publishing in OA
journals.
3.
Encourage the transition to OA publishing and study it
further.9
...particularly
prais[ing] the fact that... the only
"mandatory" recommendation [is self-archiving]"
This is a correct summary of what I said. What
is omitted
is only the fact that the actual outcome of the report is very
different from
the language with which the inquiry was launched: The original Call for
submitted evidence was 100% biased toward Gold, making no mention of
Green
whatsoever: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm.
It took "Open Access" to mean "Open
Access Publishing," and called for evidence to be submitted on the
question of
the need to reform the publishing system. It must be noted [with no
irony] that
this original position would be far more congenial to J-CG -- and his
own
theory about what the problem is and what the solution needs to be --
than was
the actual outcome, which was to recommend mandating Green and to
merely
encourage and fund further experimentation with Gold. This was indeed a
surprising turn of events; it was clearly a result of the committee's
evaluation of the actual evidence submitted in response to its Call,
rather
than just a re-assertion of its original terms; and it may represent a
historical turning point in the fortunes of both Green and OA!
"[Harnad
points out that] the two roads... compete for rare
resources and [he suggests that] ... money should be diverted to the
"Gold" road only in proportion to its (very limited) usefulness"
The 12-point summary of my argument that
precedes the
above quote is largely accurate. I would add only that it is not so
much the funding that needs
to be more rationally distributed to the
two roads to OA but rather our time, attention and action. It is the Golden road that needs a lot
of money (to
create and support new OA journals, to fund author-institution OA
publication
charges, to encourage non-OA journals to convert to OA). The Green road
hardly
requires any money at all: Creating an institutional archive is
extremely cheap
(about a $1000 linux server, a couple of days of sysad start-up-time,
and a
couple of hours a month maintenance time -- plus the few dozen
additional
keystrokes per paper it takes to self-archive the paper (over and above
the
keystrokes it takes to write it and submit it for publication): http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
).
Hence the resource the Green road competes for
is not
money, but action: authors need to perform those keystrokes, and their
institutions and funders need to adopt policies that mandate that they
do so
(for their own good -- if OA is indeed the desideratum it is purported
to be!).
So money is a red herring. What Green (and OA)
needs is
less rumination on Gold and its financing, and the long-term future of
publishing, and more action on Green and the immediate future of OA
(and
access, and impact).
"The
problem with the self-archiving argument is that,
until now at least, its results are unimpressive"
OA self-archiving's results to date are indeed
unimpressive. I don't disagree at all -- but compared to what? Certainly not compared to the results of
OA
publishing, since OA
self-archiving has
generated 3 times as much OA as has OA publishing and is probably
growing much
faster too. Green is only unimpressive relative to its own
immediate
potential for generating OA,
which is at
least 93%, compared to Gold's 5%. In that respect, it can be said that
Gold, at
5%, is much closer to its full immediate growth potential, whereas
Green, at
15%, is not. But surely the remedy for that is to devote more time,
attention
and energy to exploiting Green's full immediate potential! That is what
the
impending self-archiving mandates will do. In the meanwhile, however,
it would
help if (1) less time and attention were devoted exclusively to Gold,
as if OA
publishing and OA were the same thing, and if (2) the Gold option were
always
balanced by pointing out the Green option too.
(Green has for several years now adopted the
unified OA
provision strategy: 'If there is a suitable Gold journal for your
paper,
publish it there; if not, publish it in a Green journal and
self-archive it.'
Just taking that step of fairly presenting the two options at all times
would
go a long way toward redressing the imbalance between Gold and Green.)
"The
"self-archiving" side describes its own
strategy as a smooth, yet anarchic, way to Open Access [but, as we will
see] it
creates documentary lacunae that are fatal to the whole project"
(1) The fact that OA self-archiving grows
anarchically,
article by article means that it is uncertain whether and when 100% of
a
particular journal is 100%
OA. If
journal OA instead grew in an all-or-none way, journal by journal, it
would be
easier to decide when and where to cancel.
(2) Self-archiving creates 'documentary lacunae'? A more
theory-neutral way to describe it is as filling lacunae (with OA)!
"As
a result, librarians looking for credible
alternatives... have not been convinced"
Librarians are looking for credible
alternatives to what?
and for the sake of what? Journal affordability? But researchers do not
and
will not provide OA to their articles for the sake of journal
affordability --
though they just might possibly do it
for the sake of maximizing the usage and impact of
their
articles. And researchers are the ones who need to be convinced, not
librarians, as researchers are the only ones who can provide OA to
their
articles (whether by publishing
them in a
Gold journal or by publishing them in a Green journal and
self-archiving them.)
"Yet
[librarians] often are the ones left with the duty
of organizing institutional repositories"
The duty of organizing institutional
repositories? All
that needs to be done with institutional OA archives is to set them up
(and
sysads do that -- see above).
http://www.eprints.org/jan2004/
Then the only remaining "duty" is to fill them -- and only researchers can do that
(though
librarians can certainly help!):
http://eprints.st-andrews.ac.uk/proxy_archive.html
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do
"More
important still, a majority of scientists have not
been swayed either"
Not just more
important: most
important. Indeed
the problem of "swaying" researchers to provide the OA that they are
purported
to want and need so much is the only
real challenge for OA. And it is already clear what will meet that
challenge:
(1) Empirical evidence of the OA impact advantage
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
plus (2) an OA self-archiving mandate on the
part of researchers'
institutions and research funders to ensure that advantage is taken of
that
advantage -- by naturally extending their existing 'publish or perish'
mandate
to 'publish and self-archive'
(so as to
maximize the access to, and the usage and impact of, your articles):
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
And we already know from a recent survey that
just as
they currently comply with their 'publish or perish' mandate, most
researchers
report they will not
self-archive if it
is not mandated, but they will
self-archive -- and self-archive willingly -- if ever it is mandated by their
institutions or funders:
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/.
"the
number of articles published in "Gold"
journals (5%)... is often contrasted with the total number of articles
published
under "Green" titles (85% or more), without any mention...
that a majority of those are not actually... in
Open
Access repositories"
On the contrary, it is always stated very
explicitly (including in an
article co-appearing in the very
same issue as J-CG's article!)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/impact.html
that whereas 93% of journals are Green, only
20% of
articles are OA, 15% of them OA via self-archiving! This fact is not
being
concealed, it is being trumpeted, in
order to point out that if researchers really want and need OA and its
benefits
in terms of access and impact as much as they are described (by OA
advocates of
both the Green and Gold hue) as wanting and needing it, then it is up
to
researchers to provide it -- particularly where they have even been
given their
publisher's Green light to go ahead and do so!
But it is clear that just as far fewer
researchers would
publish anything at all (despite the advantages of publishing --
advantages
that researchers presumably want and need) if it were not for their
institutions' and research funders' "publish or perish" mandate to do
so, so
researchers will likewise not self-archive until their institutions and
research funders make their employment, salary and research funding
conditional
on their doing so. (Institutions and funders already do this
implicitly, in
making researchers' employment, salary and research funding conditional
not
only on publication, but on the impact
of publication. Since OA maximizes impact, this implicit causal
connection and
contingency now simply needs to be formalized explicitly.)
"Harnad...
estimates the ratio between the
"Green" archived articles and the "Gold" articles to be
roughly three to one in favor of the former... -- a result that, if real,
is far
from insignificant, but quite different from the [85/5] ratio"
This apparent inconsistency is very easily
resolved: The
Green/Gold ratio for actual
OA is 3/1.
The Green/Gold ratio for potential
(immediate) OA is 95/5.
"a
more fundamental problem...: Why are repositories not
growing at the rapid pace one could hope for?"
The answer is exactly the same as if the
question had
been "Why are publications
not growing
at the rapid pace one could hope for?" -- asked before the era of
"publish or
perish": Because it needs to be mandated, for researchers' own good
(and for
the good of research itself).
But, to put this in context, there is no
special question
for OA self-archiving: Although 5% of journals are OA, many of them are
still
short on submissions. (Some BioMed
Central journals publish only 5 articles per
year.) So it is true of both Green and Gold
that researchers are not yet taking full advantage of their potential.
A
critical difference, however, is that one can mandate OA self-archiving but one cannot mandate OA publishing -- for that would
be to
abrogate the author's right to choose which journal is most suitable
for his
paper (and that would most definitely meet with stout resistance from
researchers!). Nor can one mandate that non-OA publishers become OA
publishers.
Researchers' institutions and funders can only mandate OA
self-archiving -- or,
as I have proposed, more ecumenically: they can mandate OA provision, where OA can be provided either by publishing in an OA journal if a
suitable one
exists (Gold) or
otherwise by
publishing in a suitable non-OA journal and self-archiving the article
(Green).
"Institutional
archives are being created, but need to be
filled more quickly, by authors, with research journal papers.
Attracting
authors and their papers requires evidence of services that will
improve the
visibility and impact of their works"
Correct, and we are gathering and disseminating
the
requisite evidence:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
However, as noted, this evidence, and the
probability of
enhanced usage and impact to which it attests, is still not enough to
induce
a high or fast enough rate of OA-provision, just as the probability of
the
usage and impact that will result from publishing at all is not enough
to
induce publishing: The incentive to provide OA, like the incentive to
publish,
must be made explicit, as being among the formal conditions for
employment,
promotion and research funding, much the way both publishing and
research
impact are already among the conditions for employment, promotion and
research
funding.
"Is
it just a question of advocacy, or are there other
factors... that make most scientists neglect the impact advantages
linked with 'self-archiving'?"
It is a question of information and advocacy,
but also of
the need for measures to overcome researcher inertia.
"a
crucial distinction... must be drawn between Open Access
and accessibility"
This distinction -- which sounds here like a
distinction
between accessibility and accessibility -- will turn out to be a
distinction
between accessibility and ease-of-access.
Accessibility is a necessary precondition for ease-of-access, and inaccessibility
is what OA is concerned to remedy; no amount of increase in the ease-of-access to
the accessible will remedy the inaccessibility of the inaccessible.
"a
research scientist enjoys what amounts to "Open
Access" to everything [for which his institution purchases a
site-license]"
I don't think it is at all useful or
instructive to speak
of licensed institutional online access as "Open Access." OA means
online
access free for all and not only for those whose institutions have paid
for the
access. No institution can afford licensed online access to all 24,000
journals; hence OA is always for the sake of what is not accessible to any given institution because it
cannot
afford paid access to it. It does not help, in this regard, to speak of what is accessible to an institution online via
licensed access as
being OA.
That simply muddies the waters.
"How
significant a fraction... of the scientific literature
[can an institution afford to license]? This varies with each library
and its
financial resources, but Open Access it is..."
Licensed access is certainly not Open Access:
Regardless
of how significant a fraction of the journal literature any given
institution
can afford to license, OA is defined precisely in contrast to licensed
access:
OA is what is needed for that equally significant fraction of the
journal
literature that any institution cannot
afford.
"As
a result, and from the users' perspective, genuinely
"Open Access articles" actually compete with other documents that,
although very costly, appear nevertheless to be in Open Access as well"
I cannot follow this at all. Where is the
competition? If
a given article is accessible to a user via licensed access and is also
accessible free via OA (a self-archived version), what is competing with
with what, for what?
The article benefits from all the usage it gets, in both versions. What
is the
problem here? (I think J-CG is implicitly thinking of OA journals
competing
with non-OA journals here, whereas what we are speaking of is self-archived
versions of non-OA journal articles, and the notion of "competition"
simply
makes no sense in that case.)
"In
effect, the end user, the scientist-as-reader, is
being subsidized and thus benefits from a situation of artificial (and
partial)
Open Access"
I don't understand why this is being put in
this tortured
way: The article is accessible to some of its potential users for a fee
(the
institutional license toll), and to the rest of its potential users for
free
(OA); that's all there is to it. From the user's standpoint, I can
access some
articles for (institutional) fee (toll), others (sometimes the same
article)
for free (OA).
What is the fuss about here? What is clarified
by
referring to ordinary toll-access (whether institutional subscription,
site-license, or pay-per-view) as "subsidized" access, and by referring
to
institutional toll-access as "artificial" or "partial" OA? That
licensed access
is being "subsidized" by institutional tolls; and what OA is about is
precisely
what the institution cannot afford to subsidize through
institutional tolls.
"Obviously,
this greatly distorts the market conditions
and it artificially allows toll-gated articles better to compete with
Open
Access articles"
None of this makes any sense! What has the
market to do
with this? And what is competing with what? Articles compete with each
other
for usage and impact, and the articles that can only be accessed via
tolls lose
to the articles that can also be accessed toll-free (i.e., are OA). The
OA
advantage is between articles, not between non-OA and OA versions of
the same
article. The comparison is always non-OA versus OA within the same
journal and
year, where OA includes the impact of both the non-OA version and the
OA
(self-archived) version of each OA article.
If one treats this straightforward
access/impact metric
as a pseudo-economic variable, the picture is simply confused, not
clarified.
(I suspect that here too J-CG is implicitly thinking about the
competition
between OA (Gold) and non-OA journals, not noticing that this does not
make
sense for the Green case of either (1) competition between OA and
non-OA
articles in the same non-OA journal, or (2) "competition" between the
OA
(self-archived) and non-OA versions of the same article!)
"Without
governmental intrusion (in the form of support
for libraries which produce the conditions for subsidized readers), the
whole
business plan of most scientific publishers would simply collapse. In
the
present, distorted, market conditions, the competition between Open
Access
articles and toll-gated articles simply cannot be played out on the
plane of
price comparison; if it is to be played out at all, it will be on the
plane of
accessibility and value"
I have no idea why all this economic theorizing
is
obtruded into what -- without it -- was a rather simple,
straightforward
phenomenon: Toll access alone allows less access, usage and impact than
free
online access (OA). That's all there is to it; the rest is just gratuitous hermeneutics.
"Accessibility...
is more complex than a mere opposition
between open and toll-gated access... [I]t can involve the ease... with
which a
reader both retrieves information and navigates in it...
[A]ccessibility may
actually decrease while access remains constant... Delays in access
drastically
reduce use even though access per se is not modified"
Agreed that delays reduce access, but
irrelevant to the
issue at hand, which (I take it) is non-OA vs. OA.
Compare: "accessibility can decrease while
access remains
constant" with (my gloss): "ease-of-access
may decrease while accessibility
[i.e., possibility-of-access] remains constant."
Articles are more accessible, and have higher
usage and
impact, if there is a free online version of them, in addition to the
toll-access version. That is all there is to it, and that is all
that is
meant by accessibility: Toll
access
versions are accessible only to those users whose institutions can pay
the
tolls. OA versions are accessible to everyone.
"Bundling" concerns ease-of-access, not accessibility; and if/when there is enough OA content (and not the mere 20% there is now), then that can be bundled too. And Firefox can make a back-end that -- like http://paracite.eprints.org/ but automatically and silently -- performs an OA version of any search being done on a bundled toll-access database, as well as seeking an OA version of any hits yielded by the toll-access search.
J-CG is simply underestimating the power of
this medium
on account of its not yet having been more fully mobilized (simply
because the
OA content has so far been too thin to warrant or reward the effort).
The
priority now is obviously to increase the OA content (the prospect that
J-CG is
here both minimizing and misunderstanding), and then the functionality
will
quite naturally follow.
"what
is more accessible? A large [licensed] collection
of articles... or scattered collections of open access articles...
perhaps drowned
in collections of very uneven value... OAIster, for example?"
This question is too vague: What percentage
of the
literature are we imagining to be
OA, in
comparing OAIster to a licensed collection? Harvesting and indexing can
and
will be improved once there is more OA content. (Right now it would be
ridiculous to invest in improving OAIster as a precondition for
providing more
OA content! In principle, OAIster can be made exactly as convenient and
functional as a licensed collection -- with the added benefit that it
can cover
100% of the 24,000 journals (and not just the fraction for which we can
afford
licensed access) and that it is accessible to everyone (not just those
who can
afford license fees).
But it does not stop there: Once OAIster has
enough OA
content to make it worthwhile, OAIster search can easily be integrated
with
searches of licensed content, via software (as described earlier).
So these are all just spurious and arbitrary
comparisons,
and they neither contradict nor cast further light on the simple fact
that
articles that are accessible only via toll-access are for that reason
less
accessible, and hence have less impact, than articles for which
toll-access is
supplemented by a self-archived OA version.
"Clifford
Lynch writes:...'publications that are not
instantly available in full-text will become kind of second-rate...
because
people will prefer the accessibility'"
It is not clear whether Clifford Lynch is
speaking here
about instant online licensed access (to those who can afford it), or
Open
Access. Either way, this has nothing to do with the fact that OA
maximizes
access and impact.
"Andrew
Odlyzko [writes]... "Amazon... is... more user-friendly
than any library system... based on a feel for accessibility rather
than a
concern for access." Both Odlyzko and Lynch are talking about
accessibility,
not Open Access per se"
What is this distinction between access and
accessibility? If I can access it online, it is more accessible than if
I
cannot access it online, whether I access it by non-OA or OA. But if it
can be
accessed by OA it is more accessible, to more users, than if it can
only be
accessed by non-OA.
(Amazon only lets you access the metadata and a
few pages
of the book anyway, so what is the point here? We are concerned with
full-text
online access to journal articles. And what does this have to do with
the
user-friendliness of Amazon vs. the user-friendliness of library-based
systems?
or their respective scope of coverage? This is all very hirsute, and
one senses
that it must be driven by a theory, for otherwise it is just needlessly
complicating and obscuring very simple phenomena.)
"Open
Access derives its real value from its ability to
improve accessibility"
The accessibility/access distinction is so far
completely
without content. The only distinction that makes sense is limited
access
(non-OA; i.e., <100%) versus unlimited access (OA: 100%). At the
single
article level, this means accessible-to-some (non-OA) versus
accessible-to-all
(OA). There is no more to be said here; the points about ease-of-access
and
design of search engines or interfaces are irrelevant.
"[O]ther
approaches can also improve accessibility. Yet,
if all other things are equal, Open Access will come ahead of
toll-gated
publishing"
But we knew all this already, before this
needless detour
through the accessibility/access non-distinction!
"toll-gated
access is artificially subsidized... presently"
Why are we talking about toll-access
(institutional
subscriptions, site licenses, pay-per-view) as being "artificially
subsidized"?
The tolls are being paid by institutions. That's all there is to it.
And OA is
needed for all the users at institutions that cannot afford the toll-access.
"if
commercial publishers design good retrieval and
navigational tools... Open Access documents... look less attractive..."
Toll-based access will continue to look
attractive to
those who can afford it. But no matter how attractive or easy-to-use
its
retrieval and navigational tools, they are useless to those who
cannot
afford it. And that is what OA is for.
"Open
Access has to contend with more than toll-gated
articles; it must also compete with various enhancements to
accessibility"
OA is not competing! (OA journals may be competing with non-OA journals,
but we are
speaking here about OA, not OA journals. J-CG appears to be so
committed to an
economic/sociological theory that he cannot think of OA as anything but
OA
publishing...)
OA is competing with neither non-OA nor with
enhanced
non-OA accessibility tools.
OA is not competing.
It is complementing:
It is
providing access for those who can afford neither the non-OA tolls, nor
(a-fortiori) their accompanying enhanced ease-of-access tools.
"The
very librarians who [are] pro-Open Access... work...
hard to ensure that toll-gated articles...enjoy an even playing field
with Open
Access articles by artificially removing all economic barriers to the
[user, through licensing]"
This becomes more
and more
baroque: Librarians who are pro-OA are presumably helping to promote
Gold or
Green OA or both. They are also continuing to pay for whatever non-OA
they can
afford. That is clear and quite natural. But what is this about an
"even
playing field" for non-OA and OA articles?
What are they playing at or competing about or for? Non-OA articles get
only
the would-be users whose institutions can afford access; OA articles
get all would-be
users, and vice-versa. OA journal articles may be competing with non-OA journal articles; but we were speaking here about
OA, were
we not, rather than collapsing everything again into just OA publishing?
Yes, librarians
have to keep
on buying in non-OA journals, even if they would love to see all
journals
become OA journals, because only 5% of journals are OA journals, and
95% are
not. That is not irony; that is reality. And the remedy is to try to
think of
another way to reach 100% OA than to wait for 95% of journals to
convert to Gold!
"No
wonder if the library profession sometimes appears
caught in a prisoner's dilemma"
The library profession is not caught in a
prisoner's
dilemma. They are trying to buy in the access they can afford, and 95%
of
journals are non-OA, so those journals (or rather the fraction of them
that any
given library can afford) need to continue to be bought in. And
librarians are
not themselves in a position to provide OA by any means: They are not the authors, nor are
they the publishers; nor do
they have a lot of spare cash to cover OA journal publishing costs. So
they are
not in a prisoner's dilemma; they are merely trying to keep on making
ends meet
from year to year. If they have any time to spare, that time is best
spent
trying to promote institutional self-archiving, for if that practice
spreads,
librarians will not only have helped in facilitating the provision of
their own
institutional OA output, but they and their users will become the
beneficiaries
of other institutions' OA output. Time much better spent than just
trying to
promote OA journals.
http://software.eprints.org/handbook/libraries.php
"commercial
publishers ... [through CrossRef, Ex Libris
SFX, etc.]... enhance accessibility [while] the user remains... blind
to the costs"
This is all completely irrelevant: It applies
only to the
non-OA literature that an institution can
afford to buy in, whereas OA is about the literature it cannot afford to buy in.
"any
significant advance [in] accessibility... on the Open
Access side will quickly be taken up by the toll-gated side as well...
The
reverse... is not true. Tools... stitching together...disconnected archives may be proprietary"
It is again completely irrelevant that OA
resources (both
articles and search tools) are accessible to all, whereas non-OA
resources
(both articles and search tools) are accessible only to those who can
afford
them. The only relevant thing is that OA complements non-OA for all who cannot afford the
non-OA. J-CG
here seems to be spiraling higher and higher in theory-driven epicycles
that
have nothing whatsoever to do with OA or what OA is needed for (which
is not to
reform journals or remedy affordability problems but to provide access
to all
who cannot afford it, so as to maximize impact).
[I suspect that what J-CG once again has in
mind here in
referring to the two "sides" is the competition between OA journals
and
non-OA journals, not between OA
versions of
articles (self-archived from non-OA journals) and non-OA versions of
those same
articles, or with non-OA articles that have no OA version (because they
have
not been self-archived). There is simply no relevant competition to
speak of in
the case of articles!]
Rival toll-based OAIsters locking up OA
content? They're
welcome to try, but I'd bet on the ingenuity of the free OAI-service
providers
beating that of the toll-based ones every time... (But we are counting
our
chickens -- toll-based and free services -- before the OA eggs are
laid!)
"the
Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting... (OAI-PMH)...is equally applicable to open and
closed
collections [and hence concerns] accessibility... not... Open Access
per se"
Not quite: OAI-PMH does not deal with
"accessibility"
issues, it deals with interoperability (including ease-of-access)
issues, and
interoperability (of metadata) is completely indifferent as to the
accessibility
of the full-texts --
i.e., as to whether the full-texts are OA or
non-OA.
(Amongst the possibilities for OAI metadata, there is of course also that of
tagging the rights associated with a digital object:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html
http://www.openarchives.org/documents/OAIRightsWhitePaper.html
That is -- like the Creative Commons License itself
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html
-- welcome, but not
necessary, in the special case of OA self-archived versions of published
journal articles, which continue to be protected by the publisher's
copyright agreement.)
"[Free]
accessibility tools such as ParaCite... [are] still
experimental... Commercial offerings [are] more developed"
Correct. But what OA needs now is more OA, not
more tools
for the limited OA there is to date. The enhanced tools will come with
the
territory, as the percentage OA increases. In contrast, there are
plenty of
incentives for perfecting tools on the non-OA literature, which is far
bigger
(indeed, by definition, complete, 100%).
"thanks
to... subsidized [licensed] reading... commercial
publishers can... [say] their literature, although toll-gated, is more
accessible... today than... Open Access [articles]... at least in the
richest
institutions..."
This argument can only be defended if we use
this rather
arbitrary ostensive definition of "accessibility," which seems roughly
equivalent to "ease of access". But, to repeat: No degree of ease of
access is
of any use to those users who cannot afford it! So enhanced non-OA
tools are simply
irrelevant to OA.
(It is also no doubt the case that in the online
age, more
articles are accessible to more users, via non-OA, than were ever accessible
previously. This too is true, but irrelevant, because OA is about the
remaining
articles that still cannot be accessed, and about the users that still
cannot
access them.)
"How
do scientists, research institutions, or granting
agencies react to the issue of accessibility?"
How they react to the issue of ease-of-paid-access or to
the issue of access,
simpliciter?
How they react as users (of what their
institutions can
and cannot afford to access)?
Or how they react as authors (of what would-be
users at
other institutions can and cannot afford to access)?
"[Everyone]
obviously want to maximize impact, but... a
granting agency... [also] likes to demonstrate... public service...
[not just for]
research scientists... [but for] readers... from wider walks of life"
It is equally true of all potential users -- whether researcher or
general public -- who cannot
afford the non-OA versions, that what is not OA they cannot access. So
what is
the point here? The research funder wants to maximize usage and impact,
and OA
will ensure that. And self-archiving can provide immediate 100% OA.
("Impact," by the way, does not just refer to
citation
impact: There is now also measurable download-impact, and still richer
impact
indicators will emerge as the full-text OA corpus grows.)
http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php
"A
private foundation...too wants to enhance its social
function... A research center... or a university [too]"
(It is not apparent what the point is here.
This analysis
was meant to be about the relation of Green to Gold. Instead we are
being
reminded here of why we need OA at all, and that it is to maximize
access and
impact.)
"Scientific
associations often display ambivalence to
Open Access... for economic reasons"...
[T]he
Royal Society of Chemistry claims
that scientists often favor a limited number of "quality" readers and
laboratories over maximum dissemination...
However
surprisingly the issue of accessibility is
recast, it recurs nonetheless"
Scientific associations are not (and cannot be)
against
OA itself. Many are against OA publishing
(Gold), because it puts their revenues at risk. Some (fewer and fewer)
are also
against self-archiving (Green), because they think that even that might
threaten their revenues (but the number of publishers who think this
way is
shrinking fast).
The Royal Society of Chemistry is now Green http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers/63.html
So the above demurral can only be about not
wanting to
convert to Gold, not about OA in general.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how and
why J-CG
construes non-OA publishers' disinclination to convert to Gold as
having to do
with "the issue of accessibility" -- particularly in J-CG's sense of
that word
("ease-of-access"), and particularly when the non-OA publisher is
already
Green!
"The
lack of enthusiasm for institutional repositories
displayed by scientists and scholars is an interesting symptom"
Researcher sluggishness in providing OA to
their
articles is in fact the only interesting symptom (of why 100%
immediate OA --
which has already been reachable for over a decade now -- has been so
slow in
coming); and it is also the only real obstacle to 100% OA. The symptom
is
probably closely related to whatever made it necessary to create
publish-or-perish carrots-and-sticks in order to get scientists and
scholars to
publish at all. But there are also at least 32 groundless Worries that
have
been holding back OA provision despite the fact that each Worry has been
easily
(and repeatedly, and decisively) rebutted: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32-worries
"The
justifications that scientists sometimes use to
express skepticism can be a little surprising, as when authors advance
the
spurious fear of 'information overload' argument"
That's Worry #4 of the 32 Worries (and it pertains to
OA, not
just to OA self-archiving)...
"But
"information overload" is not really the
issue: Open Access can accommodate filters, hierarchies, and branding
just as
well as toll-gated contexts"
And that's the rebuttal to Worry #4: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#4.Navigation
"The
traditional value signals are still operational
since "self-archived" articles are peer reviewed and therefore can
exhibit a title with some branding ability"
Self-archived journal articles are not only
peer-reviewed:
they continue to bear the name of the non-OA journal that published
them!
(The "branding" issue will hence turn out to be a complete red
herring for
self-archiving! Non-OA journals already have their names, i.e., their
"brands."
OA self-archiving hence does not have any branding problem. It is only
new
journal start-ups [whether OA or non-OA] that have an [initial]
branding
problem, while they are still new and trying to establish their quality
standards and impact factors.)
"Michael
Kurtz [reports that] astrophysicists essentially
use one single source to do their research"
It also needs to be pointed out that (as Kurtz
notes)
astrophysics is unique in that it has virtually 100% access already --
not
through Gold and not through Green either (although a great deal of
astrophysics is self-archived too) but because astrophysics has a
small, closed
circle of journals and all active astrophysicists worldwide are at
institutions
that can afford licensed access to all of them.
"even
when articles can be accessed, a significant
difference in accessibility [i.e., ease-of-access] is sufficient to
reduce
usage [in astrophysics]"
My interpretation of this would be that in an
anomalous
field -- unrepresentative because all researchers have almost 100%
access to everything
they need already -- users will often not make the extra effort of
consulting
another accessible source even though that means something might be
missed.
This luxury (or laziness) does not translate to most other fields,
which are
far from 100% OA, and where the OA version is a mainstay rather than
just a
minor supplement with small marginal utility.
It must also be added, however, that even in
astrophysics, with its near-100% access, articles that are also
self-archived
in ArXiv still show an impact advantage:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/?submit=Show&SAstronomy%2B%2526%2BAstrophysics=on
So some astrophysicists still make the extra
effort after
all.
"
[If] a scientist finds what appears to be
"enough" information... within a limited amount of time, chances are
that the search will stop there"
The evidence that this is not true in general,
especially
where access is nowhere near 100%, is the consistent and sizable OA
impact
advantage observed across all fields. At the very least, the higher
number of
downloads and citations for articles that have been self-archived over
those
that have not is evidence that users who cannot access the non-OA
versions do make whatever
added effort may be involved in order
to access the OA versions: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3977.html
"[T]he
information found in [an] incomplete collection of
articles may be enough. The rest is then neglected unless really
glaring gaps
subsist"
Again, the empirical fact that the usage and
impact of
self-archived articles is consistently higher than that of
non-self-archived
ones, across all fields, is evidence against this (although laziness
might
explain why the OA advantage is not higher still ). And once there is
more OA,
the ease-of-access will no doubt be improved, increasing the OA
advantage still
further -- until 100% OA is reached, when the OA/non-OA advantage will
of course
vanish, although usage will remain uniformly higher for all articles,
and the
decision about what to cite will be based more equitably on merit
rather than
mere affordability (i.e., accessibility).
"Andrew
Odlyzko [writes] "even high-quality scholarly
papers are not irreplaceable. Readers... select among a multitude of
sources and...
find near substitutes when necessary"... Exhaustively gathering the
literature on
any question would require almost infinite time and resources"
But Odlyzko is referring to online vs. on-paper here, not to non-OA
(licensed
toll-access) vs. OA. And when he does refer to non-OA vs. OA, it is to
neglecting
non-OA in favor of OA (even if incomplete), not the reverse.
We are far from the possibility of exhaustive
access and
search (except perhaps in astrophysics), so there is no point talking
about it
now. What we have now is something varying from about 30% - 70% paid
institutional access to the non-OA corpus (95%) depending on the budget
of the
institution, plus about 1% - 25% OA (depending on the field). So we are
talking
about sufficient search, not exhaustive
search. J-CG seems to be
interpreting
Odlyzko's remarks as implying that sufficient search means relying on
the
available non-OA corpus and neglecting what is available OA. But the
evidence
(from the OA usage/impact studies) contradicts this (nor is this what
Odlyzko
is arguing).
"If
there is an Open Access repository in a relevant
discipline... [a user] may take a look at it...
[as] a second order recourse... But...in most
disciplines, such
repositories simply do not exist and institutional repositories cannot
substitute for them"
First, this is not how users search for OA content -- repository by repository.
Second, there is no need for disciplinary
repositories,
any more than there is a need for disciplinary indexes: ISI's Web of
Knowledge,
for example, serves all disciplines. It is via subject and journal-name
tags
(and full-text indexing) that journal contents are partitioned in the
online
age, not by putting them in a different geographic locus.
Third, institutional OA archives, for each
institution's
own published article output, in all its disciplines, are the natural
"feeders"
of the OA full-texts whose metadata can then be harvested by the OAI
search and
indexing services like OAIster.
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Eprints_LP_paper.pdf
Fourth, for anyone lacking access, the OA
version is not
a "second-order recourse": it is the sole
recourse.
Fifth, the data on the enhanced usage and
impact of
self-archived vs. non-self-archived articles (in the same journals and
years)
are a-posteriori evidence that users actually do make use of that recourse, despite the
a-priori theorizing above that
would imply they may not.
"search
engines for Open Access collections are not widely
known... [and] considered with some degree of skepticism"
What we should perhaps be considering with a
degree of
skepticism are the pronouncements of librarians on what researchers are
doing
at their desktops! The objective data on OA usage and impact suggest
that the
OA search engines and "collections" are not as unknown as all that! And
increasing OA content from its current 20% level just might make them
more
widely known -- and might inspire them to provide enhanced
functionality, in
keeping with that enhanced OA content.
"[T]his
is the fundamental obstacle: Open Access articles
are not yet sufficiently part of existing research strategies"
Why should OA articles form a bigger part of
"existing
research strategies" when OA content is still so small? a pathetic 20%!
Instead
of interpreting this current low percentage of OA content as evidence
for OA's
dysfunctionality, we should work to increase its functionality --
increasing
the percentage of OA content: by providing
it (though self-archiving)!
"If
Open Access repositories do not appear very visible
and/or credible... why should a scientist spend time to 'self-archive'?"
J-CG has both the priorities and the causality
exactly
reversed: Researchers should self-archive to maximize the impact of
their own
work; this will increase OA content and generate more OA services and
functionality.
[J-CG is making these backwards arguments as if
they were
arguments against Green OA, because (for theoretical reasons) he
prefers Gold
OA (in order to reform the publishing system, solve the affordability
problem,
etc.). But the logic of these arguments (such as it is) applies equally
against OA itself, whether Green or Gold: "Since there is so
little OA visible,
it will
not be used, so why bother with OA at all?" Again, this has all the
symptoms of
being in the thrall of a theory, and having to tie oneself into knots
in order
to support the theory. Isn't it simpler to say: OA is desirable and
beneficial,
so we should endeavor to increase OA from 20% to 100% by all means
available --
Gold and Green -- each in proportion to its immediate potential to
provide OA?]
"Google...
may lead [only] to some Open Access site, such
as a personal page or an institutional repository"
Google (or Google Scholar) can only yield the
OA that authors
have provided. That's just
one more
reason authors should self-archive (and their institutions and funders
should
adopt the carrot/stick policies that will induce them to do it)!
"Google...
may also lead to an e-mail address [for]
requesting the...article... E-mail is still the "killer app" of the
Internet and improves the accessibility of articles, toll-gated or not"
(This sounds rather vieux-jeu: Is it not more sensible to self-archive,
once and
for all, rather than to answer countless email eprint requests?)
"Why
are researchers not using OAIster [more]?...[It has]
3,420,891 records from 327 institutions...[but their] value...is
difficult to
ascertain... Harnad
is completely right when he recommends building archives explicitly
limited to
peer-reviewed articles"
Here's a much simpler answer as to why OAIster
is not
used more: because OAIster still has so little OA (as opposed to just OAI) content! That means peer-reviewed journal
articles. When you "hit" one of
those, you know it's OA, because it has the journal name.
"Journal-name" is a
potential OAI metadata tag. So is "peer-reviewed." And OAIster could
easily
display it and make it searchable -- but there's hardly any point now,
when
the real
problem is the pathetically small amount of OA content so far!
(Why keep focusing on the suboptimal
searchability of
next-to-nothing, instead of on transforming that next-to-nothing into
something
worth designing more optimal search tools for? And why keep focusing on
the users of the little OA
that there is so far,
instead of on the authors of the much more OA that there still isn't?)
My recommendation was that institutional OA
Archives
should focus on making their own peer-reviewed article output OA, now,
by
self-archiving it in their own institutional OAI-compliant OA Archives.
As far
as searchability is concerned, it is metadata tags (like "journal-name"
and "peer-reviewed"), not archive locus or focus, that will sort things
out
optimally.
"[Unrefereed]
preprints... however Green they may be... fall
in the same murky category and should be stored separately"
Why "stored separately" rather than OAI-tagged
appropriately ("not peer-reviewed" vs. "peer-reviewed" plus
"journal-name")?
I must say that the view that email is still
the "killer-app" does sound a bit out of tune with both the
possibilities and the
optimalities of the online medium! And as we shall soon see, just as
J-CG keeps
being driven by his own theorizing to think in terms of a "competition"
between
OA and non-OA articles (when this only makes sense for OA journal
articles vs.
non-OA journal articles, but makes no sense for OA versions of non-OA
journal
articles), so he keeps being driven by his own theorizing to thinking
in terms
of a need to add "value and branding" to self-archived articles (when
this only
makes sense for the self-archived versions of unrefereed preprints
[which are
virtually all destined for peer-reviewed journals], but makes no sense
at all
for OA's primary target: the self-archived versions peer-reviewed
articles, already
published in journals [whether OA or non-OA]).
"[Because
it is] necessarily distributed... [and] anarchic...
[it is] very difficult to mandate the form in which self-archiving will
actually take place"
Distributedness is a virtue, not a vice, on the
Web. It
is part of the intrinsic nature and power of the Internet itself. There
is no
need to mandate the "form" of self-archiving beyond the stipulation
that it
needs to be done in an OAI-compliant institutional OA archive, and that it is peer-reviewed
journal
articles that must be
self-archived.
Self-archiving (like the Web itself) is anarchic globally, but an
institutional
policy can make it systematic locally, at the institutional level: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php
"I
do not remember ever seeing a study discussing [the]
effect [of institutional repositories] on impact. This lack of
evidence... may
also account for the hesitation [to self-archive]"
The evidence for the OA impact advantage is
there, clear
and present and empirical! http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Those findings will be widely publicized to
researchers,
but they will still not be enough to make enough researchers
self-archive. Both
institutional and research-funder OA self-archiving mandates will still
be
needed to ensure that researchers take 100% advantage of those
advantages.
As to the strategic advantages of local
institutional
self-archiving over central self-archiving, see:
Alma Swan, Paul Needham, Steve Probets,
Adrienne Muir,
Anne O'Brien, Charles
Oppenheim, Rachel Hardy, Fytton Rowland and
Sheridan
Brown (2005).
Developing a model for e-prints and open access
journal
content for UK
higher and further education. Learned
Publishing, 18 (1), 25-40.
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Eprints_LP_paper.pdf
And, again, the problem is not the users of what (little) OA there is so far,
but the authors of the
(much) OA there isn't, yet!
"in
the case of... Pale green [journals] the procedure to
self-archive is so much more complex as to become totally unrealistic"
Only 20% of articles are OA, even though 80% of
journals
are Full-Green! Why is J-CG focusing on the (putative) complexities
of the 13% that are Pale-Green (or
the 7%
that are Gray) rather than on the 80% of journals for which the
self-archiving
procedure is straightforward?
We shall soon find out: For J-CG has a theory about how to replace the journal
publishing system
with an alternative system, and that theory depends on being able to
build the
alternative system on top of unrefereed preprints, not peer-reviewed,
published
postprints. Hence it is necessary to construe Green as being
the
self-archiving of preprints rather than postprints. The fact that 80% of journals have
already given their Green light to
postprint self-archiving -- and that BOAI-1 has always primarily
targeted the
published, peer-reviewed versions of journal articles, rather than just
their
preprints -- must accordingly be minimized (in the service of the
theory).
"How
many authors will go through the tedious exercise of
creating the corrigenda allowing moving from the submitted paper to the
published paper?"
To repeat, the vast majority (80%) of journal
articles
can already be self-archived without needing to give such complications
a
thought: so why this needless preoccupation with the more complicated
20%
minority (when all of self-archiving has still barely reached 15%!)?
(Moreover, physicists have been uncomplicatedly
self-archiving successive versions, adding corrections, for over a
decade now:
So self-archiving preprints plus corrigenda is eminently feasible. The
preprint+corrigenda strategy was in any case formulated mostly as a
reductio-ad-absurdum for Worry #10 of
the 32 prima-facie Worries to which non-self-archivers were attributing
their
non-self-archiving!)
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#10.Copyright
"How
many readers will go through the tedium of making
sure they have the right statement to use and cite in their own work
when they
have to deal with a [preprint] and a list of corrigenda?"
Does J-CG mean: How many would-be users who
cannot
afford access
to the non-OA version at all will be scholarly about the OA version
that they
do access, in the minority of cases when it is only the corrected
preprint to
which they have access? Let's leave that to historians of scholarship
to
investigate and report to us when this is all over. In the meanwhile,
can we
get on with the far more urgent and important task of reaching 100% OA?
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#2.Authentication
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#23.Version
"Given
all the issues discussed here, in particular the
question of accessibility (as distinguished from access)
"it
becomes pretty obvious why "self-archiving"
in simple institutional repositories will not be enough to create a
really Open
Access science communication system, even with OAI-PMH"
The access/accessibility distinction is
incoherent. The
access/ease-of-access issue is irrelevant.
What is obvious is that only 20% of articles
are OA, 15%
of them via self-archiving -- and that that is far from enough, and
still
growing too slowly. But that we knew already. What we have here are a
few
post-hoc conjectures as to why this might be the case. I find most of
the
conjectures off the mark, and based on misunderstandings about web use
and
functionality (and perhaps also about scholarly/scientific practice and
needs).
Far more likely than these conjectures is the
direct
testimony of researchers themselves, who state that they will not
self-archive
till they are required by their institutions and research funders to
do
so --
but then the vast majority say they will
do so, and do so willingly. In
other words, it is the same as with requiring them to publish (or
perish):
Incentives are needed; the prospect of one's findings being read, used
and
cited is not enough, unless accompanied by carrots and sticks!
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
"No
wonder... scientists are not rushing to self-archive;
no wonder.. the "self-archiving" side has welcomed mandating
"self-archive" ... If research institutions... through their promotion
and tenure procedures, and the granting agencies, through their
evaluation
procedures, favor documents in Open Access.. then Open Access will
indeed
progress. But...[this] argument [is] totally independent [of] the
impact
advantage argument"
Institutions and funders mandating OA for their
research
output has nothing to do with the "impact advantage argument" (and
evidence)?
One might as well say that the existing weight that institutions and
funders
place on journal impact factors has nothing to do with impact either!
The very reason
for OA itself, and the institutional and funder rationale for mandating that OA should be provided
(by
self-archiving) has everything to
do with impact. It is in order to maximize the visibility, usage and
impact of
their research output -- instead of continuing to limit it to only
those
users whose
institutions can afford to pay for access -- that universities and
granting
agencies are now planning to mandate self-archiving:
(Does J-CG imagine, instead, that they are
mandating OA
in order to reform the publishing system or to solve the journal
pricing/affordability problem?)
"For
the "self-archiving" side, the goal is
maximum impact and little more... [T]oll-gated journals with subsidized
reading
on the part of the libraries also contribute to improving impact and
this is
the reason why some "self-archiving" advocates seem to live quite
comfortably
with the present publishing system, however unjust it may be for
scientists who
have not yet managed to establish themselves, for example, for economic
reasons"
It is unclear why a simple, straightforward
point is
being put so convolutedly: Publishing in a non-OA journal generates
some usage
and impact, but does not maximize it, because some potential users
cannot
afford paid access. They are denied access and their potential impact
is
therefore lost. Free online access (OA), through self-archiving, ends
all
access-denial and impact-loss by adding the usage and impact of those
further
OA users to the usage and impact of the non-OA users, to yield a
maximized
total impact. That's all there is to it!
And whatever does any of this have to do with
injustice to "scientists who have not yet managed to establish
themselves... for economic reasons"? We are not talking about OA journals
here, and
about how poor authors will find the money to pay OA-journal costs! We
are
talking about self-archiving -- doing the few extra keystrokes it takes to
put the
digital text of one's published journal article (whether published in an OA
journal or a non-OA journal) online, free for all. Every
author,
rich or poor, established or unestablished, can do that!
Or is J-CG's point here about
authors whose institution has
no OA
archive yet, or cannot afford one? There are now more and more OA
archives that
will let such authors self-archive in their archives, so this too is a
non-problem. The real problem is the OA archives that exist, but are
not being
filled fast enough -- not the authors who have no archive to
self-archive in!
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse
"self-archiving,
being anarchic in nature and incomplete
in essence, works as a sort of impact bonus for those scientists
willing to do
it"
Self-archiving is anarchic in nature, but
certainly not "incomplete in essence"! Just incomplete in practice, today. Which is why systematic
institutional and
funder self-archiving mandates are needed: to remedy that
incompleteness. That
still leaves OA growing anarchically, article by article, rather than
systematically, journal by journal. But that is fine, and a buffer
against
catastrophic cancellations.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/greenroad.html
And of course OA self-archiving promises an
"impact bonus
for those scientists willing to do it" (and for their institutions and
funders
too, as well as for research productivity and progress itself). And
even for
those scientists who are presently unwilling to do it, but report that
they
will do it (willingly!) if/when it is mandated!
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
"The
anarchic nature of the process almost certainly
guarantees its incompleteness"
I cannot follow this at all: Why/how does the
fact that
OA is growing anarchically, article by article, instead of
systematically,
journal by journal, guarantee that it will not reach 100%?
"Worse,
it becomes difficult to know where the
incompleteness will appear"
It is not incompleteness that appears, but completeness! We know where the OA incompleteness (80%) is today: just about everywhere. And we know that self-archiving will
reduce it, and
100% self-archiving will reduce it to 0% incompleteness. One does not
know
today which articles are not OA
(though it's a safe guess that at least 80% are not), but one does know
that self-archiving
can make that shrink, and that 100% mandated self-archiving will make
it shrink
to 0.
There is no way to cancel journals now, or in
the near
future, on that basis -- but OA is not about, or for, canceling
journals! It is
about maximizing access and impact.
"As
a result, for most researchers, Open Access
repositories will probably not figure prominently in their literature
search
strategy"
On what evidence does J-CG base this rather
gloomy
prediction? Current author self-archiving rates? Current OA usage
rates? The
probability of self-archiving mandates? The probable efficacy of
self-archiving
mandates?
"Moreover,
in many disciplines, scientists cannot put too
much faith in the capacity of Open Access to enhance their impact"
Which disciplines are those? I can find no
difference in
the uniform OA advantage across disciplines, just some variability in
its size
and in the extent and speed of OA growth:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
Nor is there likely to be a discipline difference in the
logical principle that access is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for
impact...
"Alas,
the evidence that supports the impact advantage
thesis is still too new and limited to be part of the scientists'
common
knowledge"
Then instead of denying the existence or scope
of the
growing evidence of the OA impact advantage across all disciplines, it
might be
more useful to spread the knowledge!
"sharing
values [as] scientific exchange... is rarely...
mentioned by the supporters of the "self-archiving" strategy, but
then altruism does not appear to be their forte"
I must say that I find this call to appeal to
altruism
rather puzzling: Of course authors self-archive in order to maximize
access,
not just to maximize impact (in fact, maximizing impact depends totally
on
maximizing access!). And they are encouraged to self-archive to
maximize
access, if that is what impels them to do it! But the fact is that far
too few
authors are self-archiving for either
reason (access or impact) today. And an appeal to self-interest seems
rather
more promising than an appeal to altruism at this sluggish point --
even though
they are two sides of the same access/impact coin, and whatever
maximizes the
one, maximizes the other too.
Nor will self-archiving mandates be made more
palatable
to authors if they are based on an appeal to their altruism, rather
than on the
benefits that OA will confer on them -- even though, again, whatever
maximizes
the one, also maximizes the other.
"very
good people do not really need this step [to
maximize impact by self-archiving]; very mediocre people will not
benefit from
it anyway... Only a few average scientists might benefit a little
from...
[self-archiving. That is why it] seems to generate so little enthusiasm
at
present"
All research benefits from greater usage and
impact.
Researchers benefit from it too. How the OA impact advantage
distributes itself
across the quality/seniority/impact
hierarchy among articles and authors is an interesting empirical
question that we will soon address.
Although J-CG does not appear very interested
in
gathering the pertinent empirical data himself, nor in examining the
data we
already have, he seems quite confident in making predictions and
generalizations about their outcome...
"[C]laiming that the best road to Open Access is
"self-archiving" is excessive, not to say wrong... [W]e had better
think about ways to mix and match the "Green" and the
"Gold" roads to Open Access if we want to ensure [OA's] success and
accelerate [its] growth... Building Open Access collections must be
thought out
more cautiously than has been the case until now..."
So far, all J-CG has actually said is that
there is as
yet very little OA self-archiving today: But that datum (15%)is
contested by no
one! I am concerned with finding ways to make that percentage grow
(such as by
designing self-archiving software, citation-linking, citation analyses
and
search engines, gathering and disseminating the evidence on the OA
advantage,
designing and promoting self-archiving policies, etc.). J-CG seems to
prefer to
theorize about why Green doesn't grow, and won't.
It is not clear how this exclusive focus on the
slow
growth of Green (and the speculations as to why it has not grown
faster) gives
a hint of what mixing and matching with Gold might have to do with it:
J-CG
has, after all, not focused on the far slower rate of growth of Gold...
(Nor is it clear what "building Open Access collections" means: the outputs
resulting from institutional OA self-archiving policies? Those are best thought of
not as institutional OA collections but as institutional OA
offerings!)
"The
'Gold' road is not always...easy...to follow...[but] the
'self-archiving' side
is not easy to follow either"
The issue is not so much ease but speed, and
probability.
Both Gold and Green have been slow, but Gold has been three times as
slow as Green!
(J-CG completely overlooks this fact, stressing
endlessly
the small number of articles that are made OA by self-archiving,
ignoring that
a three times smaller number is made OA by OA publishing!)
And the probabilities are stacked much more
heavily
against Gold than Green: Only 5% of journals are Gold; the other 95%
are highly
resistant to converting to Gold, and with good reason (financial risk).
On the
other hand, 93% of journals are Green. That means the only obstacle to
93% OA
via Green is the slowness of authors to self-archive -- for which a
self-archiving mandate is the obvious remedy. There is no corresponding
remedy
for the slowness of publishers to convert to Gold.
"Where
governments decide to move in and press for Open
Access publications, a great deal of... political groundwork [is
needed]. But...
the need to rely on mandating shows that the "self-archiving" side
cannot avoid political maneuvers either"
Governments cannot and do not "move in and press for Open
Access publications": Whom can they press, how, to do what? All that
governments can do is to cover OA journal authors' publication fees.
What they can press for is Open Access itself. Research funders
can require their grantees to provide OA to their funded research
findings -- by either self-archiving all the resulting non-OA
journals articles (Green) or (if a suitable journal exists) by publishing
them instead in an OA journal (Gold) -- as a precondition for receiving research
funding at all. And research funders now seem well on the way to pressing
for exactly that. If/when they do, we will all be well on the way to 100% OA.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
"[Springer's
"Open Choice": [i.e., author can choose to pay for
OA on a per-article basis] may also help set a value scale between
impact
factors and article costs"
There is already a way to translate the OA
impact
advantage into dollars. For example, the UK Research Assessment
Exercise (RAE)
rankings -- in which rank and funding are highly correlated with
citation
counts -- can be re-calculated to show how much a rank would be raised,
and how
much more income would result, if a department or a university mandated
OA
self-archiving:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/
"Ultimately,
the point of the "Gold" road is to
create intellectual value in new and better ways. To achieve this goal,
the
"Gold" road must pay attention to more than the impact advantage that
addresses only the author side of the scientist. A scientist is also a
hurried
reader and value can be built out of better searching, retrieving, and
navigating tools... The "Gold" projects should strive to collaborate to
create citation links and indices"
"Create intellectual value"? Is it not simpler
and more
theory-neutral to say that OA journals make their articles OA, and
charge the
author-institution, whereas non-OA journals charge the
user-institution? Do we
really need the theorizing about "creating intellectual value"? After
all, we
all know what journals do: they implement peer review and tag the
result with
the journal's name, and its associated track-record for quality. OA and
non-OA
journals both do that; they just charge different parties for it.
Gold journals should certainly collaborate and
citation-link, and they do. But so do all the non-Gold journals (Green
and
Gray) do the same. And so do OA Archives and harvesters, like http://citebase.eprints.org/
. So what is the point here?
"The
"Pale Green" case should be treated apart
from the two other shades of Green... [and its] specific status should
be clearly
indicated in the metadata, particularly in OAI-PMH"
I would suggest quite the opposite.
"Pale-Green"
(endorsing preprint self-archiving) is a journal policy (of 13% of journals, currently; 80% are
Full-Green,
endorsing postprint self-archiving). Endorsing preprint self-archiving
is not
a property of an OA article. What
an OA
article needs to indicate clearly is whether it is an unrefereed
preprint or a
peer-reviewed postprint (along with the journal name in the latter
case).
"[A]
deep shade of Green should be... for publishers that
give an irrevocable [emphasis added] right to "self-archive"...
[or] leave the copyright in the authors' hands... [because publishers
could]
suddenly rescind... the permission to "self-archive" and thus bring...
down
the whole OA edifice... Harnad... treats [this] as useless speculation,
but the
danger is...real"
It is indeed completely useless speculation to
worry (Worry #32)
about Green reverting to Gray at a time when 93% of journals are Green
(80%
Full-Green) whereas only 20% of articles are OA! It is an utter waste
of time
to be contemplating the need for further shades of Green, rather than
self-archiving while the going's Green:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32.Poisoned
"[W]e
must find a way to move from institutional to
disciplinary and even specialty repositories. This is important because
it is
easier to create the former than the latter and they are presently
multiplying"
It is not only unimportant to move from
local
institutional to central archives of any kind, but unnecessary,
inadvisable and
counterproductive. In the distributed online age, contents are sorted
by
metadata tagging, not by physical locus or focus. And the author's
institution
is the natural locus for mandating institutional self-archiving,
monitoring
compliance, and measuring and rewarding impact (for all of its
disciplines).
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Eprints_LP_paper.pdf
"[We
must] aggregate... and repackage the information that
is contained in these institutional repositories along subject lines...
[through]
inter-institutional collaboration and coordination"
(All these confident plans about which way
institutional
OA self-archiving archives need to go, having argued up to this point
mostly
against their utility a-priori!)
What OA archives need is only one thing: OA
articles. And
what is needed to induce authors to self-archive their articles is a
self-archiving mandate. This has nothing whatsoever to do with
aggregating and
repackaging or with inter-institutional collaboration and coordination.
Each
institution need merely ensure that all of its own annual journal
article output
is self-archived in its own OAI-compliant OA archive. The rest will
take care
of itself, quite naturally, via OAI-interoperability (and the
reciprocity inherent in institutions self-archiving their own research
output).
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ACF1E88.pdf
"metadata
should be...clear and standardized... to allow...
disciplinary representation [and]
efficient concatenation of disciplinary articles ... [H]arvesting
across all
repositories...is not enough... disciplinary harvesting must be
available... with
competitive forms of subject packages. This would lead to new value
hierarchies
and new ways to create value. As a consequence, the value creation
capacity of
toll-gated journals would tend to be somewhat diluted"
Is J-CG proposing to re-invent the OAI
protocol? He is
breaking down open doors!
And all of this has to do with
interoperability,
harvesting, and search. Nothing to do with diluting "the value creation
capacity of toll-gated journals"! That is all just theory-spinning.
One day 100% Green OA might engender a transition to Gold -- or it
might not. Today, that is
utterly irrelevant. What is relevant and pressing today is the need to
reach
100% OA as soon as possible. That is already well within reach and long
overdue.
What we need is not "new ways to create value", but new ways to access
the value we have created already --
for all those potential users who do not now have access to that value.
"Who
should take charge of this new form of
presentation?"
Who should take charge of what
new form of presentation? And what does
"take
charge" mean? The OAI-PMH was created so OAI service-providers (like
OAIster
and Citebase) can "take charge" of services like harvesting,
citation-linking and
search across the distributed, interoperable OAI-compliant OA Archives.
http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html
Institutions make their own journal article
output Open
Access by self-archiving it in their institutional OA Archives for all
potential users who cannot afford access to the non-OA version: What's
to be
taken charge of? And why is this a "new form of presentation" rather
than a
complementary means of access?
"Various
consortial forms already exist among sets of
libraries: licensing consortia, interlibrary loan consortia, new kinds
of
consortia based on institutional repositories... [These] can [bear] new
kinds of
disciplinary projects... [L]icensing consortia... [could create]
disciplinary
repositories across their members. Prestige hierarchies, based on the
reputation of the institutions involved, will emerge..."
In this complicated congeries of consortia,
could I ask a
simple question? What is this conglomeration all about? We are busy
conceptually repackaging content that we do not have yet, and
content
[i.e., articles published in journals with names]
that will not need any repackaging
.
Why are we not focusing on
the practical task of actually providing the (absent) content, now, instead of
theorizing about hypothetical future consortia to re-label and
redistribute it?
"I
would suggest starting not with peer-reviewed
articles, but rather with doctoral dissertations [emphasis added]"
Here we have arrived at the heart of J-CG's proposal.
OA's target is peer-reviewed articles. Only 20% of them are OA to date. And
J-CG suggests that we not "start" with them, but with self-archiving
dissertations (some of which are being self-archived already).
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all&type=theses
Why are we being asked to start our mixing match with dissertations?
(The answer will shortly become apparent: We
will never in fact be moving
on to self-archiving peer-reviewed
journal articles, in J-CG's recommended mix/match scenario: We will
instead
somehow -- it
is never specified quite how (but one guesses that it is by going on to
self-archive unrefereed preprints rather than peer-reviewed journal
articles) --
segue into the construction, bottom-up, of a brand new alternative
peer-review
and publication system, somehow, on top of these dissertations, to
replace the
existing peer-reviewed journals. This is in fact J-CG's version of the
Golden
road, of creating OA journals; it is not a mix-and-match of Green and
Gold at
all! It is an independent reinvention of the entire wheel. The first
step is
new forms of "quality evaluation" -- arising, somehow, out of new ways
of "promoting the intellectual value" of doctoral dissertations...)
"an
inter-institutional strategy to promote the
intellectual value, authority, and prestige of doctoral theses could
easily
provide the testing ground for the emergence of inter-institutional
disciplinary archives"
I am at a loss: At a time when out of 2.5
million annual
peer-reviewed articles in 24,000 journals -- all of them already having
whatever intellectual value they already have --
only 20% are OA, we are being bidden to self-archive
dissertations and to promote their intellectual value! But isn't it the
other
80% of those already-evaluated but still inaccessible articles that we
really
need? And is this, then, the promised alterative Green-and-Gold
mix-and-match
proposal?
"Evaluation
Levels: The metadata should also be extended
to provide some indication of quality. It could be designed to help
identify
the identity and the nature of the evaluating body that passes judgment
over
the documents in the repository. In other words, the metadata should
help
identify the quality, nature, and procedures of groups that begin to
work as
editorial boards would. The metadata could also help design evaluations
scales
- imagine a one brain, two brain, ... n-brain scale, similar to a
Michelin
guide for restaurants"
Quality metadata? For dissertations? Whatever
for? We are
not trying to create a dissertation peer-review service. We are trying
to
provide OA for the other 80% of already peer-reviewed articles; and
their "indication of quality" is the name of the journal that already
performed the
peer review on them!
For journal articles, the "evaluating body" is
the
journal, tagged by its name. For dissertations, who knows? (And who
cares,
insofar as OA is concerned? Quality-tagging dissertations has nothing
to do
with OA.)
We don't need a Michelin guide to journal
articles! We
just need access to the articles, and their journal names! Here we are
instead
busy reinventing peer review, in hitherto untested and (as we shall
see) rather
extravagant new forms:
"Users
should have a clear idea of who the reviewers are
and how much they can be relied upon"
Is J-CG suggesting that the journal name
(contrary to
what has been the case until today, irrespective of whether the journal
is
online or on-paper, OA or non-OA) is not enough? That articles should
be tagged
with the names of their (often anonymous) peer-reviewers too? (That
sounds
rather radical, for an untested proposal.)
Or is this just about tagging dissertations
with their
university and committee names? (Fine, but how does that generalize to
journal
articles? And what has it to do with gaining Open Access to those
articles?)
"This
leads to a new project: If various universities
create consortia of disciplinary repositories, then nothing prevents
them from
designing procedures to create various levels of peer review
evaluation, e.g.,
institutional, consortial, regional, national, international"
This is a new project indeed! For the old
project was to
provide Open Access to the remaining 80% of the existing 2.5 million
annual
articles in the existing 24,000 peer-reviewed journals. Now we are
talking
about what? Reviewing the peer review? Re-doing the peer review?
Replacing the
peer review?
I suspect that -- driven by his
publication-reform theory -- what J-CG is really contemplating here is
entirely replacing the non-OA journals
in which 95% of these self-archived articles are currently being
published! But
OA itself is just about providing free, online access to those
peer-reviewed
journal articles, not about wresting them from the journals that
published
them, and from their peer-review -- at least not OA via the Green road
of
self-archiving.
Nor is that what a journal means in giving its
Green
light to self-archiving: that you may treat my published articles as if
they
had never been peer-reviewed and published, and simply start the whole
process
anew! Nor is there any point in starting the whole process anew, if it
was done
properly the first time. It is hard enough to get qualified referees to
review
papers once, let alone to redo it (many times? at many "levels"?) all
over
again.
Nor is that what the authors or the would-be
users of
those already peer-reviewed, published articles need or want. What
authors and
users want is Open Access to those articles.
How did we get into this bizarre situation? It
was by
accepting the invitation to populate the OA Archives with dissertations
instead
of peer-reviewed journal articles, as a "testing ground." Apparently,
we are
never to graduate to self-archiving journal articles (Green) at all:
Rather, we
are to rebuild the whole publication system from the bottom up,
starting with
dissertations, and then generalizing and applying it to the unrefereed
preprints of articles-to-be. (J-CG has wrongly inferred or imputed that
"Green" means mainly the self-archiving of unrefereed preprints, rather
than the peer-reviewed, published postprints that are OA's main target!)
In other words, we are to reform the
publication system
after all, just as J-CG recommended. Never mind about providing Open
Access to
that other 80% of existing journal articles: We will instead create new
evaluation bodies (Gold). We have time, and surely all parties will
eventually
go along with this project (in particular, all those sluggish authors
who had
not been willing even to self-archive...). They are to be weaned from
their
current journals and redirected instead to -- it is not yet altogether
clear
what, but apparently something along the lines of: "various levels of
peer
review evaluation, e.g., institutional, consortial, regional, national,
international"...
"At
that point, a recognized hierarchy of evaluation
levels can begin to emerge [emphsis added]... clearly
identifiable through
the metadata... [indicating] what level of peer review and evaluation
is being
used... [and] which group is backing it. In effect, this is what a
journal does
and... how it acquires some branding ability"
In effect, the current journal system is what
J-CG is
proposing (because 95% of journals have obstinately declined to go
Gold) to replace (bottom-up,
starting with dissertations) with the
above "emergent" Gold system, consisting of "a recognized hierarchy of
evaluation levels" ("clearly identifiable through the metadata"). And
this
alternate "branding" system, starting with dissertations, is to emerge
as a
result of mixing-and-matching Green-and-Gold.
What follows is speculation piled upon
speculation, all
grounded in this initial premise (that if you can't convert them,
replace
them):
"An
international registry of such evaluation procedures
and of the teams of scholars involved could then be developed... [to]
lend
transparency and credibility to these value-building procedures. In
this
fashion, a relatively orderly framework for expanded peer review and
evaluation
can emerge"
J-CG has managed to resurrect here, almost
exactly, the
very same incoherence that beset Harold Varmus's original 1999 E-biomed
proposal, which could never quite decide whether what was being
proposed was:
(1) free access to journal articles, (2) an archive in which to
self-archive
articles to make them freely accessible, (3) a rival publisher or
publishers to
lure away authors from existing journals (4) an alternative kind of
journal or
journals, with alternative kinds of peer review, or (5) all of
the
foregoing:
http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45
That somewhat mixed-up and ill-matched 1999
vision is
what has since become gradually more sorted out and focused in the
ensuing
years, as follows: First, PubMed Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
was created (February, 2000) as a central OA
archive in which publishers were invited to deposit their contents six
months
after publication. When few publishers took up that invitation, the
Public
Library of Science (PloS) was founded (October 2000) and circulated an
Open
Letter, signed by 34,000 biomedical researchers the world over,
demanding that
existing journals should go Gold http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml
.
When that too failed, PLoS became an Open
Access
Publisher (2001) and has since launched two Gold journals http://www.plos.org/journals/index.html
(forgetting altogether about Green
self-archiving). Most
recently (2004), perhaps having noticed that the Golden road to OA is a
rather
long and slow one, PLoS again took up the Green road of self-archiving
by
helping to promote the NIH public-access policy (which requests that
all
articles resulting from NIH-funded research should be self-archived in
PubMed
Central within 6 months of publication): http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html
J-CG now proposes to resurrect something very
much like
the original 1999 matchless E-biomed mix once again! I would like to
make the
counter-proposal that once was enough: that we should forget about
trying to
rebuild the publishing system bottom up (with a vague, untested,
speculative,
and probably incoherent mix-and-match model of archiving and
publishing) and
instead reinforce the road that Harold Varmus, PLoS, the Wellcome
Trust, the UK
Government Select Committee, and many others have lately rejoined (and
the one
they would have been better off taking in the first place) -- the Green
road to
OA -- by promoting the OA self-archiving of the remaining 80% of the
existing
journal literature as a condition of research funding (and employment).
"any
paper could be evaluated more than once, and in any
case peer review is certainly no longer limited to the prepublication
stage"
Now J-CG is resurrecting JWT Smith's (likewise
untested
and unrealistic) 1999 "Deconstructed Journal" proposal, and its easy
profligacy
with a rare and already overworked resource -- the pool of qualified
referees --
contemplating not just one but many peer-reviews for the same
article, at multiple stages and
levels.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0216.html
Yet recall (faintly, if you still can) how and
why this
all started out: The need to provide Open Access to the 2.5 million
annual
articles published in the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, because of the
many
potential users who could not afford the toll-access to them. Here we
are now,
offering them, in place of actual OA to the actual 2.5 million annual
articles,
hypothetical OA to hypothetical future articles, in hypothetical future
journals, refereed -- not just hypothetically but miraculously -- by
multiple
hypothetical systems of peer review, implemented by hypothetical
"Deconstructed
Journals."
Today's would-be user, denied access to those
of the 2.5
million actual articles he wants and needs, today, can be forgiven for
not
feeling much better off with what he is being offered here instead...
"[G]ranting
agencies can do their part and help clarify
the evaluation levels and processes...constructively participat[ing] in
the
general reworking of value creation that is so lacking in pure
"self-archiving" at the present time"
Consider how much more OA granting agencies would get in exchange for
their pains if instead of "clarifying evaluation levels and processes to
constructively participate in the general reworking of value creation"
they simply mandated that "pure self archiving that is so lacking at
the present time": That would ensure Open Access to the portion that
they fund of the 2.5 million annual articles in the world's 24,000 peer
reviewed journals -- an extant value that wants only access-creation,
not value re-creation.
"New
Journal Models: Transparency, prestige, and rigor
are needed to create credible value... something like "overlay
journals" [will] begin to emerge and... gradually acquire visibility and
respect.
At that point, the institutional repositories will have effectively
morphed and
matured into a consortium-based network of repositories with a rich set
of
value-creation tools and increasingly recognized names or labels"
The trouble is that all the "morphing" so far
is
happening only in the mind of the passive speculator; and meanwhile 80% of
articles
continue to be inaccessible to those would-be users who cannot afford
access --
yet that was supposed to be
the problem
OA was remedying.
Just like E-biomed and "deconstructed journals," "overlay journals" are
at the moment figments of the armchair theorist's
imagination.
Moreover, it is not even clear what "overlay journals" means. If it
just means
conventional journals (whether hybrid or online-only) implementing
online peer
review by having submissions deposited on a website and then directing
referees
and revised drafts to the site, then most journals are already overlay
journals
in this banal sense.
If "overlay journals" means journals that are
online
only, then that is nothing new or interesting either. If it means that the archive
to
which the referees go to find the paper and where revised drafts are
put is not
the journal's website but an OA Archive (whether institutional or
central),
then that too is uninteresting -- just a trivial
(and quite natural) implementational variant
of a standard feature of extant journals and conventional (online) peer review: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/peerev.ppt
If the journal itself performs only peer review and certification, and the
archives do
all access-provision and archiving, then this may have some potential
interest,
some day -- but there exist at most a handful of journals that resemble
that
description today, and between them and the remaining 99.99% of
journals is the
still unsettled future of OA (Gold) journals and their cost-recovery
model.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2
So overlay journals are still just an armchair
speculation: But 100% OA need not be -- and it certainly need not wait
for the "morphing" of the current 24,000 journals into overlay journals.
"As
a result of this evolution... original submissions will
be addressed to these new channels of scientific communication [overlay
journals]... in parallel with, the fact [they] will have been already
"published" in traditional journals. This is where the importance of
"self-archiving" really finds its anchoring point... All this can be
achieved by treating the "self-archiving" strategy as a transition
phase on the way to the "Gold" objective"
It is hard to see how an article that has
already been
published in a traditional journal
can
become an "original submission" to an "overlay journal" -- harder still
to see
this as self-archiving's real "anchoring point." Perhaps self-archiving
should
just stick to the more mundane task of providing immediate OA to the
remaining
80% of the current journal literature, rather than waiting for this
hypothetical new multilevel, multivalent system to evolve?
The only "transition phase" that is worth
talking about
(and is tested, and visible, and reachable) is the transition from
today's 20%
OA to 100% OA via self-archiving. After that, nolo contendere -- and hypotheses non fingo! "Finally,
because an even playing field will be
established between toll-gated publications and open access articles,
be they
"Gold" or "Green," the impact advantage of genuine Open
Access will have a much better chance of asserting itself unambiguously"
I still have no idea what this means! What is
meant by an "even playing field" between OA and non-OA articles (as
opposed to articles in
OA journals versus non-OA journals)
when articles in the same non-OA journal have both non-OA and OA (self-archived) versions? How can an article, or
an OA
advantage, compete with itself? And why? http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm Comments on Footnotes: "1
See the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
published on the Web on February 14, 2002,
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml. To qualify
as Open Access, a document must follow two different
sets of conditions that were clearly outlined in the Bethesda
declaration,
http://www.earlham.edu/ peters/fos/bethesda.htm#note1. (1) The user is
granted
a number of rights (e.g., "a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual
right
of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and
display the
work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works"); (2) the
document must be archived "in at least one online repository that is
supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government
agency, or
other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access";
these are the exact words of the Bethesda Statement on Open Access.
They refine
and elaborate upon the definition that emerged with BOAI. The Public
Library of
Science endorses the Bethesda definition of Open Access (see
http://www.plos.org/about/openaccess.html) " The term 'Open Access' was coined and defined
by the
BOAI, and, as noted, two roads to OA were specified : the Green
road
(BOAI-1, OA self-archiving of articles published in non-OA journals)
and the
Gold road (BOAI-2, publishing articles in OA journals). The Bethesda statement was the first of several
subsequent statements and declarations that re-focused both the
definition of
OA and the strategy for achieving it on Gold alone. Note how in the
Bethesda
statement, self-archiving
(BOAI-1) has
become merely 'archiving' (which is of course a necessary condition for
both
Gold and Green, for even Gold must provide free online access
somehow!). That,
together with the (needless) stipulation that OA requires rights
re-negotiation (which it does not
-- for
what is already at least 93% of journals!), effectively meant that the
only
articles that would be considered OA would be those that were either
published
in OA journals or in journals that were prepared to become formal OA
journals-on-demand on an individual-article basis. Self-archived
articles --
even those from most of the 93% of journals that are Green -- would not
count as
OA according to this new Bethesda criterion, because they had not
renegotiated
rights with the publisher to make them exactly equivalent to articles
published
in an OA journal! This unnecessary, arbitrary and
counterproductive criterion
was subsequently propagated to the Berlin Declaration and most further
formal
statements on OA for several years, with the result that OA was taken
to be
equivalent to OA publishing (BOAI-2) and self-archiving was relegated
to its
archiving dimension, rather than the independent -- and far more
powerful and
direct -- Green road to OA provision that it is, and continues to be,
according
to the original BOAI definition! "2
This 'reader pays' phraseology is as inaccurate as the 'author pays'
expression. Later in this text, we shall speak about a 'subsidized
author'" This is correct. The descriptor should be
'author-institution payment' vs. 'user-institution payment' (the former
being
the OA publishing cost-recovery model and the latter being the non-OA
publishing cost-recovery model: subscriptions, site-licenses,
pay-per-view).
Just as non-OA online access is no longer based on individual payment,
but
institutional payment, neither OA nor non-OA authors are meant to pay
anything
out of their individual pockets. Correct. Self-archiving is author-institution self-help to
maximize impact
(or minimize the loss of potential
impact) by providing online access to all would-be users, web-wide, and
not
just those whose institutions can afford paid access. "6
See http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
...The "Green" and "Gold" terminology itself seems to have
been invented by Stevan Harnad while discussing the results stemming
from the
RoMEO study" The information on individual journal
self-archiving
policy (rather than just publisher self-archiving policy) is available
at http://romeo.eprints.org/
-- a site which also dispenses with the excessive, unnecessary and
uninformative color codes at the SHERPA site (yellow, blue, red, white)
and
provides the relevant information: Green light to self-archive
peer-reviewed
postprint, FULL-GREEN [70%]; pre-refereeing preprint, PALE-GREEN [13%],
neither
yet, GRAY [7%]. "10
The tradition of exchanging offprints among scholars
and researchers is a clear example of a situation where affordability
and
access are sharply kept distinct" More accurate description: Researchers
generally provide
access to their own work merely in order to provide access (and
maximize
impact), with no thought one way or another regarding journal pricing
or
affordability! If forced to think about it explicitly, researchers
would no
doubt agree that (1) if their work were already available online to all
of its
potential users (2) then they would not need to bother self-archiving
and that
(3) this would be the case if every journal in which they published
were
affordable to and licensed by every institution of every potential user
-- but
(4) unfortunately it is not. The reasoning from
1-4 is rather trivially obvious, however, and need not
really be explicitly formulated in order to arrive at this much
simpler
decision: I will self-archive in order to maximize the access to and
the impact
of my work! "12
For an interesting discussion on the number of
refereed journals and articles, see http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2983.html. The figures quoted in this discussion
range
from 15,000 titles (Eugene Garfield) to 24,000 titles (Stevan Harnad)
with a
corresponding spread in the number of articles published annually: from
1.5 to
2.5 million-the ratio of 100 articles/journal/year is commonly used in
the
scientific, technical, and medical disciplines (STM). The figure of 85%
dates
back to the early part of August 2004. On August 25th, Stevan Harnad
advanced
the 93% figure along with the conversion of the Royal Society of
Chemistry
(http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3938.html) " This is all correct. It should only be added
that it
makes no difference whether the true number of peer-reviewed journals
is closer
to 12,000 (Garfield), 24,000 (Ulrichs) or 48,000 (as others have
suggested).
The percentage Green is an estimate based on a sample of publishers (107 publishers, publishing
9000
journals, and including the top journals in most fields), and the
relative
amount of OA via Green and Gold is in the ratio of 3/1 regardless of
what the
true percentage of the total is. "13
It must be noted that until publishers gave their
various forms of Green light to self-archiving, its very possibility
was very
problematic at best" This sounds like a call for (retrospective!)
Zeno's
Paralysis: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3188.html
. Authors who have been self-archiving since the
early '90's have sensibly just gone ahead and self-archived instead of
waiting for a green light from anyone (let alone worrying that
once given, it might be
taken back again)! For example, out of 300,000 papers
self-archived
by physicists since 1991, only 4 have since been withdrawn citing
copyright
considerations http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3188.html. Had the authors of those 300,000 papers instead
thought
along the lines J-CG seems to be thinking (and recommending?), over a
decade of
impact would have been needlessly lost for those authors -- as it was
lost for
that vast majority of authors who did not
self-archive during that decade! "20
Sidney Redner suggests to multiply the total number
of citations by their average age" The latest findings on the self-archiving OA
advantage
show that it is present across years, for recent and 10-year-old
articles
alike. (What is not yet taken into account yet, however, is when the self-archiving was actually done.) http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
"32
At the hearings of the UK Commons Select Committee,
the Royal Society of Chemistry [argue, against OA]: 'Currently most
authors
care where their work is seen and who it is seen by far more than they
care
about how many people have seen it'" Although it thus argues against Gold, the Royal
Society
of Chemistry has nevertheless gone Green: http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers/63.html
"42
if [a better] search engine is so simple to
duplicate, why is it not already done?" Because OAIster does not yet have remotely
enough OA
content to make the effort worth its while! Most effort now needs to be
invested in generating more OA content, not in gussying up the little
OA content
we have! Fortunately, the authors of, for example, the
300,000
physics papers and the 500,000 computer science papers that have been
successfully and uncontestedly self-archived since the early '90's did
not
think the same way J-CG does in this matter! (Moreover, the percentage
of
Pale-Green journals has further shrunk from 30% to 13% since J-CG wrote
these
words...) "59
The expression "overlay journal" may not
satisfy all and other terms have been suggested, such as "Article
Database" or "deconstructed journal." http://library.kent.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/d-journal.htm " All these expressions are unsatisfactory,
because the
concepts behind them are premature and have not been carefully
thought-through
(let alone tested and shown to be viable!). If/when journals ever decide to become (1)
online-only and
to offload all (2) text-generation, (3) archiving and (4)
access-provision on
the author's institutional OAI archive network, (5) leaving the journal
with
only the service of peer review to perform, and its outcome to certify
with its
journal-name, then the
journal-name will be the certification tag (no "overlay journals" to
speak of)
and the journal will have become a peer-review service provider. (Still
nothing
like a "deconstructed" journal, which is, and will probably remain, an
untested, unrealistic, and probably incoherent hypothesis.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0943.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2897.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3806.html
Conclusion: What is needed today is already quite clear:
100% OA by
the fastest and surest means possible. It is also clear what that means
is:
self-archiving (Green), which now needs to be mandated by researchers'
institutions and
funders. There is also scope both for the growth of OA journals (Gold)
and for
experimentation with hypothetical new systems in parallel with the self-archiving of all
peer-reviewed,
published journal articles (Green) -- but not in place of it. Let there be no mix-up about that! Acknowledgement: Many
thanks to Alma Swan for her astute and helpful remarks on this critique.
"scientists-as-authors
appear incapable of implementing a
complete form of Open Access simply through "self-archiving," be it
mandated or spontaneous... [The] need to rely on institutional policies
and
parliamentary committees demonstrates the incomplete nature of the
"self-archiving"
strategy taken in isolation"
The assertion is clear. What is not at all
clear is (1) how
and why self-archiving (even
taken "in
isolation") is asserted to be incapable of providing complete, 100% OA
--
especially (2) once it is mandated. Nor is it clear (3) why relying on
a
mandate means self-archiving is asserted to be incomplete (rather than just too slow!).
"perhaps
the [UK] Select Committee meant to lay out a
phased strategy:...we can begin by doing all the "self-archiving" we
can. In parallel, other strategies should be studied and implemented
later to
complete the "self-archiving" strategy and make it viable"
That is precisely what the UK Select Committee did recommend: immediately mandating OA
self-archiving (Green),
and in parallel, continuing to support and study OA publishing (Gold). And
that was
indeed the right decision, and the right priorities and weight.
"Open
Access should not be the tactical tool of a few,
elite, established, scientists that want to enhance their careers and
little
else"
No one has suggested OA is, or should be the
tactical
tool of a few, elite, established, scientists. It is J-CG, however, who
suggested (without saying how, or why) that impact enhancement through
OA
self-archiving would only benefit the elite, established scientists.
The
analysis by author/article seniority and quality-level is yet to be
done, but
there is no particular reason to expect that the OA-impact advantage will be only,
or even
mostly, at the top.
"Open
Access does not need to draw an absolute knowledge
divide between scientists and the rest of the population, between
elites and
the 'masses'"
Who is drawing such a divide? Most of the
annual 2.5
million articles published in the world's peer-reviewed journals are
specialized scholarly/scientific articles that are only of interest to
fellow-specialists; but OA articles are accessible to any interested
user. So
what is the problem?
"[OA]
does not eschew vigorous competition... [and] insists
that the playing field should remain reasonably even and fair"
Vigorous competition between what and what?
(J-CG again
seems to be thinking only in terms of OA journals vs. non-OA journals
here.)
"5
self-archiving is a self-help measure to open up the
possibility of further impact gains"
"44
the Pale Green publishers [limiting
"self-archiving" to preprints] account for 30% of all publications...
[so] I had given very little credence to "self-archiving" before
"real" Green publishers began to be identified in the RoMEO project"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0216.html