Self-Archiving Mandates

The Surf Foundation has released a survey on "Acceptance of the JISC/SURF Licence to Publish & accompanying Principles by traditional publishers of journals."

The gist of the survey result is that more and more publishers are moving toward explicitly endorsing author open-access self-archiving, and that the majority already endorse it.

This is good to know, but it was already evident from the EPrint Romeo statistics (derived by clarifying the SHERPA-Romeo data, and presenting it at the individual journal level). These statistics have been available and regularly updated for several years now.

Two comments:

(1) The Surf Foundation survey obscures the results somewhat, because it uses the needlessly profligate, irrelevant and confusing colour codes of SHERPA-Romeo ("green", "blue", "yellow", "white") when all we need to know is:

GREEN (62%) (journals that endorse immediate open-access self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint)

PALE-GREEN (29%) (journals that endorse only unrefereed preprint self-archiving)

OTHER (9%) (journals that do not endorse self-archiving of either preprint or postprint, that embargo self-archiving, or that charge authors money to self-archive)

(2) There is some confusion about what is meant by "open access" in the Surf report (whether (i) Gold Open Access journal publishing, (ii) Green Open Access author self-archiving, or (iii) the adoption of the JISC/SURF licensing recommendations).

For articles in the GREEN journals (62%) that endorse immediate author self-archiving of the postprint there is no need for the JISC/SURF license. It is always welcome, but not necessary in order to provide Open Access. (And even for articles the 38% non-GREEN journals, repositories can implement the "email eprint request" button to facilitate users requesting and authors providing almost-immediate, almost-OA while trying to renegotiate copyright, waiting for the embargo to elapse, or waiting for the journal to go GREEN.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum