CRITIQUE OF ALPSP'S 1ST RESPONSE TO RCUK'S  OPEN ACCESS SELF-ARCHIVING POLICY PROPOSAL

This is a response to:

"Dissemination of and access to UK research outputs." Response from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) to the RCUK [Research Councils UK] Position Statement on Open Access to Research Outputs. (2005)

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Preamble: One can hardly ask for a better argument against ALPSP's 2005 Response to RCUK than ALPSP's very own 2004 Report 'Principles of Scholarship-Friendly Journal Publishing Practice'

Here are some relevant quotes from that 2004 ALPSP Report:

The needs of authors
Our own surveys (1,2) have shown that two needs are of equally great importance to authors: maximum dissemination of their work, and publication in the most prestigious journal possible.

1) Dissemination

1.1 Dissemination by the author
It is in publishers' as well as authors' interest to maximise access to authors' work. There are many good examples of author agreements which enable authors to retain the rights which are particularly important to them (3):

1.1.1 Posting of preprints
According to our own survey of 149 publishers, including all the leading players (4), nearly 50% of publishers have no problem with authors posting a preprint or submission version of their article on one or more of their own, their institution's or a disciplinary website or repository, although some impose certain conditions such as requiring a link to the published version (5). So far, experience in those (relatively few) fields -- such as high energy physics (6) - where such repositories are active suggests that there is little or no damage to subscription or licensing income from the research journals.

1.1.2 Posting of final version
Our survey (7) shows that over 60% of publishers allow authors to post the final, published version of their article on websites or repositories (8), some even providing the PDF for this purpose. Although some speculate that increasing use of OAI-compliant metadata will ultimately enable such posting to undermine subscription and licence income, this does not seem to be the case so far....

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Conclusion
It is in publishers' interest to satisfy the needs of their authors, readers and institutional customers to the best of their ability; this entails paying close attention to what these communities are saying, and collaborating with them to develop new approaches as need arises. Scholarship-friendly publishers maximise access to and use of content; they also maximise its quality and, thus, prestige. It goes without saying that -- by one business model or another -- publishers need to make enough money to cover their costs and stay in business; but they recognise that institutions' funds are increasingly inadequate to purchase all the information required by users, and they welcome collaboration with their customers to find new approaches which might solve this dilemma.

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(All plain italic display-quotes preceded by "ALPSP:" are from the 2005 ALPSP Response to the RCUK's proposed self-archiving mandate.)

ALPSP: "ALPSP encourages the widest possible dissemination of research outputs; indeed, this furthers the mission of most learned societies to advance and disseminate their subject and to advance public education. We understand the benefits to research of maximum access to prior work..."

An excellent beginning!

ALPSP: "ALPSP recognises that maximising access must be done in ways which do not undermine the viability either of the peer-reviewed journals in which the research is published"

No one would disagree with this either.

ALPSP: "Understandably, therefore, [publishers] may not wish their "value-added" version to be made freely available in repositories immediately on publication."

Quite understandable, and self-archiving is accordingly not about the publisher's value-added version -- not the copy-editing, not the XML markup, not the publisher's PDF -- but only about the author's own preprint (unrefereed draft) and postprint (corrected final draft). That is what is to be made available, “freely and immediately, in repositories.”

ALPSP: "Even if the freely available version lacks some or all of the value added by the publisher, it may be treated as an adequate substitute by uninformed readers"

The freely available version is intended for the use of those potential researcher/users worldwide whose institutions cannot afford access to the publisher's value-added version. It is accordingly a more than adequate substitute for informed users who do not have acccess to any other version at all!

ALPSP: "(and, indeed, by cash-strapped libraries). And any new model which has the potential to "siphon off" a significant percentage of otherwise paying customers will, understandably, undermine the financial viability of all these value-adding activities."

Surely the financial viability of the values-added is determined by their market value. As long as the added values have a market value, they remain viable. All evidence to date is that the self-archived free versions co-exist peacefully with the publishers' value-added versions, serving as supplements for those who cannot afford access to the value-added version rather than substitutes for those who can:

Swan & Brown (2005): "[W]e asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view [self-archiving] as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirrorsite at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)." Swan, A. & Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. JISC Technical Report.

ALPSP: "The National Institutes of Health in the USA has attempted to address this concern by delaying, for up to 12 months after publication, the point at which deposited material becomes freely accessible. The 12-month period was arrived at after considerable discussion with society and other publishers; it goes some way to addressing their fears about the impact on subscription and licence sales. Even the Wellcome Foundation, which has not consulted with publishers, recognises the need for a 6-month embargo."

The NIH and Wellcome embargoes concern the date of deposit in a central NIH/Wellcome Archive, PubMed Central (PMC), in which the metadata and perhaps also the full-text will appear in an enhanced ("value-added') form added by PMC.

The RCUK mandate concerns the self-archiving of the author's own preprints and postprints -- by the author in the author's one institutional repository -- for the sake of maximising immediate research progress and impact.

Research impact and progress are certainly not maximised by imposing 6- or 12-month embargoes! The value-added publisher's version can wait, but research itself certainly cannot, and should not.

ALPSP: "Although in some areas of physics, journals have so far coexisted with the ArXiv subject repository, some of our members in other disciplines already have first-hand evidence that immediate free access can cause significant damage to sales."

It would be very helpful if we could see precisely what this "other" evidence is, and precisely what it is evidence of. As physics and computer science are the fields that have self-archived the most and the longest, and all of their evidence is for peaceful co-existence between the authors’ supplementary drafts and the publisher's value-added version, it would be very interesting to see what evidence, if any, exists to the contrary. But please do make sure that the putative evidence does address the issue, which is:

How much (if at all) does author self-archiving reduce subscriptions?

The evidence has to be specific to author self-archiving, anarchically, article by article. It cannot be based on experiments in which journals systematically make all of their own value-added contents free for all online, for that is not the proposition that is being tested, nor the policy being recommended by RCUK!

ALPSP: "We therefore recommend that the Research Councils should respect the wish of some publishers to impose an embargo of up to a year (or, in exceptional cases, even longer) before self-archived papers should be made publicly accessible."

RCUK should require immediate self-archiving of the author's own postprint drafts (and strongly encourage preprint self-archiving too) for the sake of immediate research usage, progress and impact. Access to the publisher's value-added version can be embargoed for as long as the publisher deems necessary.

ALPSP: "It should be stressed that any restrictions are intended simply to ensure the continuing viability of the journals, which allow authors (under either copyright model) all the rights which our research indicates they require, including self-archiving"

The message is clear: Authors can and should self-archive their own drafts ("inadequate" though these may be), immediately, for the sake of research progress. The publisher's value-added version can be subject to whatever restrictions publishers see fit to impose.

ALPSP: "It seems to us both inappropriate and unnecessarily wasteful of resources to create permanent archives of versions other than the definitive published versions of articles."

It is not at all clear why publishers should be concerned with what authors elect to do with their own "inadequate" versions, in the interests of research. Publishers' concern should surely be with their own definitive, value-added versions, not whatever else the research community elects to do to maximize research progress and impact.

ALPSP: "[A] significant proportion (41%) of existing Open Access journals do not, in fact, cover their costs"

It is not clear why the topic has been changed here to Open Access Journals: What the RCUK is requiring is self-archiving; it is not requiring publication in Open Access Journals.

ALPSP: "while ALPSP supports the principles which underlie the RCUK policy, we believe that existing publishing arrangements go a long way towards meeting the first three principles, and that publishers' concerns about the potential negative impact [emphasis added] of self-archiving must be addressed."

Existing publishing arrangements go a long way, but the RCUK policy goes the rest of the way, for the sake of all the potential researcher-users worldwide whose institutions cannot afford the publisher's value-added version, despite the existing publishing arrangements.

It is in order to put an end to the needless and costly loss of that potential positive impact on research that the RCUK self-archiving mandate has been formulated.

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A Prophylactic Against the Edentation of the RCUK Policy Proposal

Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads:

"A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy"
"Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!"
"Nature Back-Slides on Self-Archiving [Corrected] (2005)"
"Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding"

On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Sally Morris (Chief Executive, ALPSP) wrote (in the SPARC Open Access Forum:

SM: "It beats me how people can argue on the one hand that repositories are necessary to solve libraries' financial problems"

If anyone is arguing for OA self-archiving in order to solve libraries' financial problems, they are certainly barking up the wrong tree. As we have argued over and over:

"the journal-affordability problem and the article-access/impact problem are not the same" Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30 (4) 2004

Institutional repositories (and institutional self-archiving mandates) are necessary in order to maximise research access and impact, not in order to solve libraries' financial problems. Conflating the two has always been a fundamental mistake, both practical and conceptual, and one that has done nothing but lose us time (and research progress and impact), needlessly delaying the optimal and inevitable outcome (for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders): An OA self-archiving mandate has nothing to do with library financial problems. It is adopted by researchers' employers and funders in order to maximize their (joint) research impact.

(But I agree that if many others had not repeatedly made this unfortunate and common conflation, Sally could not have made her own specious argument by way of reply!)

SM: "Stevan, I don't know what planet you live on (;-) but on Planet Earth the problem librarians are trying to address - and the reason for any enthusiasm for repositories or any other means of OA - is a shortage of funds"

Sally, that might be the reason for librarians' (and library funders') enthusiasm for OA, but it is not the main reason for OA. The reason for OA is to maximise research impact, hence research progress and productivity. And the providers of OA are not and cannot be librarians (be they ever so enthusiastic): The only providers of OA are the researchers themselves. And the only reason that will persuade them (and their funders) to provide OA is that it maximizes their research impact.

So whereas both the publishing community and the library community are marginally implicated in OA (each can either help or hinder it) OA-provision itself is 100% in the hands of the OA-providers: the research community. It can and will be done only by and for them.

It is to the terrestrial research community that the RCUK mandate is addressed.

SM: "and on the other [hand, how can people argue that self-archiving]... will not lead to increased subscription/licence cancellations and thus, ultimately to the collapse of journals"

The argument that self-archiving can and will increase research impact substantially is based on objective fact, tested and demonstrated by (a) years of self-archiving and by (b) repeatedly-replicated objective comparisons of citation impact between self-archived and non-self-archived articles in the same journals and issues, across all fields.

The argument that self-archiving will lead to journal cancellations and collapse, in contrast, is not based on objective fact but on hypothesis. There are of course counter-arguments too, based on counter-hypotheses. but it is also a fact that all objective evidence to date is contrary to the hypothesis that self-archiving leads to journal cancellation and collapse.

When -- in reply to Sally's statement:

SM: "Although in some areas of physics, journals have so far coexisted with the ArXiv subject repository, some of our members in other disciplines already have first-hand evidence that immediate free access can cause significant damage to sales."

I asked Sally for that evidence, she has now replied:

SM: "the evidence I've been given so far was in confidence"

So apparently the world research community is to contemplate continuing to refrain from maximising its research impact -- despite the many-times replicated objective evidence that self-archiving can and does maximize research impact -- on the strength of confidence in a hypothesis about eventual journal wrack and ruin, based on confidential evidence, unavailable for objective evaluation.

(This kind of empty -- but ominous-looking -- hand-waving, by the way, is precisely the grounds on which the NIH self-archiving mandate was reduced to the toothless dictum it has become, sans requirement, sans immediacy, sans everything.)

SM: "Incidentally, the NIH embargoes are slightly more complex than Stevan suggests - authors are encouraged to deposit papers immediately on acceptance; the embargo relates to the date when they are made publicly available; I chose my words with care! Wellcome on the other hand is, I understand it, talking about the date of deposit."

Promptly "depositing" papers in NIH's PubMed Central (PMC) so that they can just sit there, inaccessible, for 12 months? That sounds exactly as pointless as it ought to sound to anyone who remembers, if ever so faintly, that what this was all about was maximising research access and impact (immediately). The objective was not to perform a symbolic central-depositing ritual followed by an arbitrary research-wasting gestation period, in which the document -- meant to supplement paid access for those would-be users who cannot afford it -- instead simply lies fallow, for absolutely no defensible reason, at the continuing cost of daily, weekly, and monthly research impact and progress, exactly as it had done before the dawn of the online/OA era at last made it possible to put an end to that gratuitous impact loss once and for all!

Sally is right, however, that the NIH policy is more complicated than merely being the empty "request" to deposit papers ("immediately"), only to wait 12 months for them to become accessible to their intended users (6 months for the marginally less unwelcome Wellcome Policy). It is also only a request to deposit them in PMC, rather than what it could and should have been, namely, a requirement to deposit them immediately in each researcher's own institutional repository (with NIH/PMC harvesting them centrally if/when they see fit).

That would have been a policy that actually maximized research access and impact, rather than locking in a gratuitous year of access/impact loss (with the whole thing merely optional rather than obligatory to boot -- and almost inviting publishers to back-pedal on their existing immediate-self-archiving policies... in the name of NIH-compliance !)

And now here is RCUK, proposing precisely the optimal policy for maximizing research access and impact, and here's Sally hoping to pull its teeth much the way NIH's were pulled!

Fortunately, there is a way the RCUK policy can be protected from unneeded and unwanted NIH-style dental work! The key would be that the RCUK mandates distributed, institutional self-archiving rather than NIH-style central archiving. Hence each author can decide for himself whether and when to set access to his own full-text as "Open Access" (OA) rather than just "Institution-internal Access" (IA). Both the full text and the metadata, however, must be deposited immediately in the fundee's own institional repository. Those keystrokes must be performed. The metadata of course always immediately become openly accessible to all, webwide. (There is not even the semblance of a juridical issue about the author's metadata!) But the single keystroke that determines whether access to the full-text is institutional or worldwide can be left to the author (with strong encouragement to make it OA as soon as possible).



With such a policy, there is no point in anyone (including ALPSP) lobbying RCUK about embargoes: RCUK has simply mandated the immediate keystrokes and strongly encouraged the Nth one ("OA"). And research is still leaps and bounds ahead as a result. For not only do over 90% of articles already have their journal's green light for the Nth keystroke, but for the less than 10% that don't, the author can, for the time being, simply respond to email eprint-requests for the full-text (based on the openly accessible metadata) by doing the further keystrokes needed to email out the postprint to each eprint-requester.

Eventually, of course, nature will take its course, the author will tire of the needless keystrokes, and will simply do the Nth keystroke to make his postprint OA (as the sensible authors will all do in the first place). (The long overdue transit to the optimal and inevitable has -- it is now patently obvious – always been just a keystroke problem all along. Once the keystrokes are mandated, nature can be safely trusted to pursue its optimal course forthwith, guided by the incentive of impact -- and prodded by the nuisance of eprint-requests!)

But the point is that in the meanwhile, it will not be possible to edentate (q.v.) the RCUK policy in the same way that the NIH policy managed to get itself so sadly disfigured. And all the keystrokes will get done.

(Sally is characteristically coy about coming out and saying whether she is for or against giving the publisher's green light to the immediate institutional self-archiving of the author's own "inadequate" [Sally's word] final revised draft: She is eloquent about its inadequacies, but rather evasive about whether she would be for authors [immediately] setting that Nth keystroke -- for that self-same inadequate full-text -- as OA, or merely IA!)

I close by re-quoting in full the call for evidence in support of Sally's rather alarmist hypothesis of doom and gloom:

SH: “It would be helpful to see precisely what this "other" evidence is, and precisely what it is evidence of. As physics and computer science are the fields that have self-archived the most and the longest, and all of their evidence is for peaceful co-existence between the author's drafts and the publisher's value-added version, it would be very interesting to see what evidence, if any, exists to the contrary. But please do make sure that the putative evidence does address the issue:

“How much (if at all) does author self-archiving reduce subscriptions?

“The evidence has to be specific to author self-archiving, anarchically, article by article. It cannot be based on experiments in which journals systematically make all of their own value-added contents free for all online, for that is not the proposition that is being tested, nor the policy being recommended by RCUK!”

And, to repeat Sally's reply:

SM:"the evidence I've been given so far was in confidence"

Amen.