Rationale for OA

CC-BY or CC-NC?

If the topic is Open Access to refereed research journal articles, this is the wrong question to ask.

The right license, providing the right re-use rights, will depend on the field of research, the specific research findings, and the researchers.*

But we are nowhere near ready to consider such questions yet, for the simple reason that there is no basic Open Access yet.

We cannot remind ourselves often enough that Open Access is -- first and foremost -- about access: What made Open Access possible was the advent of the online medium (the Internet and Web): It made it possible to make refereed research journal articles accessible to all users, not just to those whose institutions could afford subscription access.

That possibility has been there for at least a quarter century now, and yet three quarters of research published yearly today is still accessible only to users whose institutions can afford subscription access.

So why are we talking about CC-BY vs. CC-NC, while still not having provided basic Open Access?

Institutions and funders should first and foremost mandate making refereed research journal articles accessible to all users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access.

The ideal mandate would require the author's refereed final draft to be deposited in an OA repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, and also made OA immediately upon deposit.

A compromise that is much easier for everyone to adopt as a first step is to require the author's refereed final draft to be deposited in an OA repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, and strongly encourage (but not require) that it be made OA immediately upon deposit (and to put a cap on how long it is allowed to embargo OA).

Once immediate deposit has become universal, the first and biggest hurdle of OA -- still not surmounted after 25 years now -- will at last be surmounted.

And once that has at last happened, all the rest will follow:

-- the death of embargoes,
-- the growth of subscription cancellations, making subscriptions no longer sustainable to cover the costs of publishing,
-- the downsizing of publishing and its costs to just the peer review service alone
(all access-provision and archiving now being done via the worldwide network of OA repositories),
-- the conversion of journals to Gold OA at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of a fraction of the subscription cancellation savings
(instead of double-paid, double-dipped and grotesquely over-priced, as now, when subscriptions cannot be cancelled because the Green OA version is not yet universal)
-- the licensing of as many re-use rights as users need and researchers want to provide.

Instead focusing prematurely and needlessly on CC-BY vs CC-NC today is putting the cart before the horse -- and getting us next to nowhere.

*In general, scientists prefer not to have their work altered without their permission. So the CC license that virtually all researchers would agree to is CC-ND: no derivatives (meaning the text cannot be altered). For allowing re-mix, it depends on the field and the researcher. And of course machine data-mineability for research as well as for search and retrieval are always desirable and beneficial.

But anothor contingency to bear in mind in this transitional period is this: What we need most is immediate, unembargoed OA. If we insist on a CC-BY license, publishers will insist on an OA embargo; I think many will insist even with CC-NC. The former would allow immediate free riding by rival publishers. The latter would still allow competing republication. So both encourage publishers to adopt embargoes.

In contrast, immediate-deposit Green works with or without publisher embargoes -- and once it becomes global, it will undermine all OA embargoes, thereby opening the door to subscription cancellations, Gold OA and as much CC as we want.

First things first. Mandate immediate-deposit. But don't turn it into a restriction on authors' journal choice by insisting on CC-X prematurely (and needlessly).

If it is not part of the mandate, of course, and a field has a preference for one of the CC licenses where posssible, its use can be recommended.

In viewing their testimony before the House of Lords Select Committee on UK Open Access Policy, one is rather astonished to see just how misinformed are the three witnesses -- Professor Rick Rylance, Chair of RCUK; Professor Douglas Kell, RCUK Information Champion; David Sweeney, Director (Research, Innovation and Skills), Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) -- on a number of key points.

Professor Kell's impression seems to be along the lines that "all the worldwide OA policies are like ours [the UK's] regarding Gold, and the rest of the world is taking its lead from us."

Unfortunately this is no longer the case at all.

And although the three witnesses extol the economist John Houghton's work as authoritative, they rather startlingly misunderstand his findings:

The witnesses cite Houghton's work as (1) evidence that Green OA is more expensive than Gold and as (2) support for the UK's new policy of paying for Gold OA in preference to providing Green OA.

Houghton's findings support neither of these conclusions, as stated rather explicitly and unambiguously in Houghton & Swan's most recent publication:

"The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch Report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work... [our] main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not yet anywhere near having reached an OA world. At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold OA — with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost."

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold" D-Lib Magazine Volume 19, Number 1/2

What Houghton and coworkers said and meant about Green as the transitional policy concerned an eventual transition from (1) today's paid subscription access to (2) paid subscription access + Green OA to (3) post-Green Gold (with subscriptions no longer being paid).

Houghton was not at all referring to or supporting a transition from (I) the current RCUK policy in which Green is "allowed" (though grudgingly and non-preferentially) to (II) an RCUK policy where only Gold is allowed (but subscriptions still need to be paid)!

Quite the contrary. It is the added cost of subscriptions that makes pre-Green Gold so gratuitously expensive.

In the background, it's clear exactly what subscription publishers are attempting to persuade the UK to do: Publishers know, better than anyone, now, that OA is absolutely inevitable. Hence they are quite aware that their only option is to try to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, on the pretext that it would destroy their business and hurt the UK economy to rush into OA without subsidizing subscription publishers by paying extra for Gold. And this self-interested alarmism is succeeding -- in the UK.

Meanwhile, the policy-makers in the UK remain under the misapprehension that they are still the leaders, setting the direction and pace for worldwide OA -- whereas in reality they are being rather successfully taken in by the publishing lobby (both subscription and Gold), while the rest of the world has stopped following the UK on OA since its gratuitous and unaffordable U-turn from mandating already-paid Green OA self-archiving to double-paying for Gold OA.

But it's not just the publishing lobby that's behind the U-turn from Green OA: There are two other notable sources of misdirection:

(1) The Wellcome Trust, a private biomedical research-funding charity that believes it has understood it all with its slogan "Publishing is just another research cost, and a small one, 1.5%, so we simply have to be prepared to pay it, and in exchange we will have OA":

What Wellcome does not reckon is that, unlike Wellcome, the UK government is not a private charity, with only two decisions to make: "What research shall I fund, and to whom shall I pay the 1.5% of it which is publication fees?"

The UK, unlike Wellcome, also has to pay for university journal subscriptions, university infrastructure, and a lot else. And the UK is already paying for 100% of all that today -- which means 100% of UK publication costs. Any money to pay for Gold OA is over and above that.

Nor does Wellcome -- a private funder who can dictate whatever it likes as a condition for receiving its research grants -- seem to appreciate that the UK and RCUK are not in the same position as Wellcome: They cannot dictate UK researchers' journal choice, nor can they tell UK researchers to spend money on Gold other than whatever money they give them.

Nor does Wellcome give a second thought to the fact that its ineffective OA mandate owes what little success it has had in nearly 10 years to publishers being paid to provide OA, not to fundees being mandated to do it.

Yet in almost every respect, the new RCUK policy is now simply a clone of the old Wellcome policy.

(2) The minority of fields and individuals that strongly advocate CC-BY licenses for all refereed research today have managed to give the impression that it is not free online access to refereed research that matters most, but the kinds of re-mix, text-mining, re-use, and re-publication that they need in their own small minority of fields.

To repeat, it is incontrovertibly true and highly relevant: CC-BY is only needed in a minority of fields -- and in no field is CC-BY needed more, or more urgently, than free online access is needed in all fields.

Yet here too, it is this CC-BY minority that has managed to persuade Finch/RCUK (and themselves) that CC-BY is to the advantage of -- indeed urgently needed by -- all research and researchers, in all fields, as well as UK industry. Hence that it is preferable to use 1.5% of UK's dwindling research funds to pay publishers still more for Gold CC-BY to UK research output (and pressure authors to choose journals that offer it) rather than just to mandate cost-free Green (and let authors choose journals on the basis of their quality standards and track-records, as before, rather on the basis of their licenses and cost-recovery models).

The obvious Achilles Heel in all this is unilaterality, as Houghton & Swan point out, clearly.

None of the benefits on which the UK OA policy is predicated will materialize if the UK does what it proposes to do unilaterally:

The Finch/RCUK policy will just purchase Gold CC-BY to the UK's own 6% of worldwide research output by double-paying publishers (subscriptions + Gold OA fees).

In addition, the UK must continue paying the subscriptions to access the rest of the world's 94%, while at the same time UK OA policy -- by incentivizing publishers to offer hybrid Gold and increase their Green embargo lengths beyond RCUK's allowable 6-12 in order to collect the UK Gold CC-BY bonus revenue -- makes it needlessly harder for the rest of the world to mandate Green OA .

As long as the UK keeps imagining that it's still leading on OA, and that the rest of the world will follow suit -- funding and preferring Gold OA -- the UK will remain confident in the illusion that what it is doing makes sense and things must get better.

But the reality will begin to catch up when the UK realizes that it is doing what it is doing unilaterally: It has chosen the losing strategy in a global Prisoner's Dilemma.

Let us hope that UK policy-makers can still be made to see the light by inquiries like the Lords' and BIS's, and will then promptly do the simple policy tweaks that it would take to put the UK back in the lead, and in the right.

(Some of the Lords in the above video seem to have been a good deal more sensible and better informed than the three witnesses were!)

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

Comment on: UK research funders announce grants for open-access publishing (Richard Van Noorden, Nature)

First, a correction: Gold vs. Green does not mean immediate Gold OA from the publisher vs. delayed Green OA from the author’s institutional repository. Most Green OA (60%) is immediate OA too. And for the 40% that is embargoed by publishers, repositories have the “Almost OA” Button.

Second, that 60% vs 40% refers to Green OA, whose worldwide UNmandated annual average is about 25% today. So that’s 60%/40% of 25% or about 16% immediate Green OA and 8% Almost-OA globally today.

Now to RCUK: As Richard notes, even the old, weak RCUK mandate, with no compliance assurance mechanism, did better than the worldwide average.

Evidence has since shown that strong mandates provide much higher Green OA rates (over 70% within two years).

Hence the RCUK, in wasting scarce research money on Gold instead of strengthening its compliance assurance mechanism for cost-free Green OA, would be designing a self-fulfilling prophecy. This would fail, because most UK researchers would rightly refuse to comply with Gold and the rest of the world (funders as well as universities) is meanwhile mandating Green.

A European Green OA Mandate may help restore RCUK to its senses and put it back on a realistic path to 100% OA, focused on research interests instead of publishing interests.

Stevan Harnad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some quote/comments follow below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad

Excerpts from ongoing discussion:

Glyn Moody:

OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy - if true, this looks disastrous for UK :Open and Shut?: OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy

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Cameron Neylon:

Disagree strongly with Stevan here. His main objection is that this will annoy researchers but to be honest the Wellcome has been taking this line for some years with no signs of revolt. Yes the question of pricing is core but what the RCUK policy does is push those purchasing decisions exactly where they should be, at the institutional/researcher level.

Its not a bug, its a feature.I disagree a lot of Stevan on strategy, which is fine, but from a tactical perspective I don't think what he's doing is at all helpful. He's basically alienating all the people we need to work with to get the implementation right. And because he has such a loud voice it is assumed that he speaks for a larger group than he does.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

+Cameron Neylon From reading the interview it seems to me that +Stevan Harnad's main objection is not that it will annoy researchers but that it creates a loophole for publishers to force authors to pay atronomical prices for Hybrid Gold OA instead of using Green OA. This does sound rather serious to me.

However I agree with you that instead of attacking the RCUK so harshly in public, he should instead just have talked to them directly, point out the problem he discovered and present his solution to them. He seems to be convinced that the RCUK opened the loophole by mistake and not on purpose, so they should be open to his recommendation.

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Cameron Neylon:

It's not a mistake its quite deliberate. RCUK position as I understand it is that they want to ensure there is a market - if authors don't like the price that journals are charging they should go elsewhere. I would prefer a green option in these cases myself but they're prepared to take the flack. What they can't do is set prices...as a QUANGO this would be illegal - what they can do is set up a system where there is price sensitivity and that's what they've done.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

But isn't that was Finch is aiming for as well?

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Cameron Neylon:

Finch doesn't really aim for anything - it suggests what the priorities are, but it's main weakness in my view was precisely in not providing a mechanism that constrains prices. Several routes to this: one is ensure a green option is allowed and viable (one sentence to this effect in Finch would have changed the whole tone). The second is to force researchers to be price sensitive - which seems to be the RCUK route. A third is for the funder to take on the price negotiations - this is the Wellcome approach.

An awful lot depends on how publishers respond. On previous evidence they will cave in, set prices as high as they think they can get away with, but not so high no-one will pay...which will get us close to a net neutral position, but with a functioning market that will then bring prices down.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

It seems that this is really the central question: How important will price be for authors? Will they favor a less well-known journal with similar quality but lower price, or will they stick with the prestigious journals, no matter the price?

Moving the decision to the authors is definitely a good start. I agree that with subscription-based journals the fact that authors don't have to care about the subscription price and can always go for the most prestigious journal is a huge problem.

Now we'll see how fast authors will adapt their decision process.
I surely will, since for me price will be a lot more important than Impact Factor - I aim for other ways of getting my work known anyway.

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Thomas Pfeiffer

I also wonder what +Peter Suber has to say about this?

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Peter Suber:

Hi +Thomas Pfeiffer: In general I'm with Stevan on this. The RCUK policy and the Finch recommendations fail to take good advantage of green OA. Like Stevan, I initially overestimated the role of green in the RCUK policy, but in conversation with the RCUK have come to a better understanding. In various blog posts since the two documents were released, I've criticized the under-reliance on green. I'm doing so again, more formally, in a forthcoming editorial in a major journal. I'm also writing up my views at greater length for the September issue of my newsletter (SPARC Open Access Newsletter).

For more background, I've argued for years that green and gold are complementary; I have a whole chapter on this in my new book . So we want both. But there are better and worse ways to combine them. Basically the RCUK and Finch Group give green a secondary or minimal role, and fail to take advantage of its ability to assure a fast and inexpensive transition to OA.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:
 

Thank you for stating your opinion here, +Peter Suber. I know that you have been promoting Green OA and I've read about your opinion on the Finch report and your initial very positive reaction to the RCUK policy. Seems like I missed your posts about your opinion on RCUK after a re-examining it, so it was interesting to know what you think about it by now.

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Cameron Neylon:
 

It's probably worth saying that I broadly agree with +Peter Suber 's position (and even to an extent Stevan's) but I disagree with Stevan's tactics. I don't think that the RCUK position is so bad - but its a question of degree. It also has to be understood in the context of the philosophical background to the policies. Stevan has generally argued from a public good perspective - more research available for researchers to read is a public good - rather than a technological or industrial policy perspective.

RCUK and Finch are coming from a much more innovation and industry focussed perspective. Their central motivation is to ensure that research is maximally available for exploitation. They don't want to rapidly get to a public access environment and then have to fight through to a CC-BY OA environment - they want CC-BY as the immediate goal and see this as the fastest way to get there. So the goals are somewhat different - which leads to a difference in tactics - but we can also disagree over whether the tactics are optimal given the goals.

FWIW I agree with Eve, the publishers know exactly how weak their position is and are unlikely to resort to extensive gouging. In turn we can use the differences in policy between the US, Europe, and the UK as a pincer to tackle both sets of issues (access and rights) simultaneously.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

I concur. Until now I hadn't realized that the differences between preferring Gold or Green OA depended on the philosophical stance, but the way Cameron explains it, it absolutely makes sense. However I can't really say which position seems more valid to me, they both have good reasons speaking for them.

I can only say that most of my colleagues prefer Green OA - for the obvious reason that they want their research to be widely available but still want to publish in prestigious journals without paying high prices for it. 

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Cameron Neylon:

Yeh, the trouble I have with the whole "its free!" argument is that of course, it isn't. That seems to be getting missed in the discussion somewhere. We are paying for this - and we should be able to do this by at worse zero-sum with some transitional costs. Frustrating that people still believe the current system is "free".

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Stevan Harnad:

reply to +Cameron Neyon

1. PRIORITIES

Yes, free online access to refereed research (Gratis OA) + various re-use rights (Libre OA) is better than Gratis OA alone.

But free online access is incomparably more urgent and important for research and researchers than Libre OA today.

Universal Gratis OA worldwide is also fully reachable today, free of extra cost, via effective Green OA mandates from funders and institutions.

RCUK's is an ineffective mandate as currently formulated, insisting on paying extra for Libre Gold OA out of scarce research funds instead of providing cost-free Gratis Green OA. 

In its present form, the RCUK mandate will be resented and resisted by UK researchers and is unscalable to the rest of the world.

I hope its drafters will have the good sense and integrity to fix the RCUK mandate: It just needs two simple patches to make it effective and scalable.

Once Green OA is effectively mandated worldwide, affordable Gold OA and all the re-use rights users need and authors want to provide will follow.

But not if UK -- till now the worldwide leader in OA policy and provision -- instead cleaves to a needless, costly and unscalable RCUK OA policy.

2. ZERO-SUM REASONING AND ZENO'S PARALYSIS

Green OA self-archiving of articles published in subscription journals is completely free of extra cost while subscriptions are paying (in full, and fulsomely!) the cost of publication.

If and when global Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, then, and only then, should the (remaining, much reduced) costs of publication be paid for via Gold OA, out of a fraction of the subscription savings.

Not now, pre-emptively, before Green OA prevails -- or instead.

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Richard Poynder:

+Cameron Neylon wrote: "Stevan has generally argued from a public good perspective - more research available for researchers to read is a public good - rather than a technological or industrial policy perspective. RCUK and Finch are coming from a much more innovation and industry focussed perspective." 

I am not sure what industry Cameron is referring to here. Certainly, if Stevan is correct then the publishing industry has a great deal to gain from RCUK and Finch. However, I suspect he means that CC-BY can turn research papers into raw material that new businesses can use (by, for instance, mining their content). That's fine, but at what price?

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Stevan Harnad:

DECLARATION OF INTERESTS

@Thomas Pfeiffer wrote: "Until now I hadn't realized that the differences between preferring Gold or Green OA depended on the philosophical stance"

Thomas, I don't think the difference is a matter of philosophical stance. I think it depends on whose and what interests are motivating one's position on OA, Green OA and Gold OA.

I am happy to declare mine: They are the interests of research, researchers, and the general public whose taxes pay for the research and for whose ultimate benefit the research is funded and conducted. 

To a certain extent, the R&D industry also figures in this equation, but primarily as a user and applier of the research, just like researchers, and hence as a net contributor to the public good -- not merely as another proprietary means of creating wealth for itself, in the way the research publishing industry is doing. 

This applies especially to secondary content-based industries (e.g., Thomson-Reuters ISI, or Google or Connotea... or Mendeley) that now have a financial interest in "technologically enhancing" OA research output -- in much the same way that publishers stress that they are "technologically enhancing" their proprietary research content, in arguing that it should remain locked in their hands and continue to be paid for. 

Ironically, the interests of the OA-content enhancing industry can generate surprising stances, such as favouring extra payment for Gold OA over cost-free Green OA because it buys a form of Libre OA that is necessary for their product or service. This is a direct conflict of interest with the interests of research, researchers, and the general public who funds the research and for whose ultimate benefit the research is funded and conducted. 

Another ironic similarity between the interests of the content-enhancing industry is that they too, like the publishing industry, keep stressing that research -- both raw research and peer-reviewed research -- is "not free": Publishers stress this in defending the price of subscriptions or the price of Gold OA; content-enhancers stress this, again, in arguing for Gold OA payment for the Libre OA they need for their products and services. This is again in direct conflict of interest with the interests of research, researchers, and the general public who funds the research and in whose interest the research is being done. (It also makes no sense, because the costs in question are not the ones at issue: the publishing industry many times aired the canard that their access-tolls are somehow justified because the Internet is "not free"!)

I urge commentators, before they reply, to have another look at my short posting on PRIORITIES. Gold OA and Libre OA are secondarily beneficial to research, researchers and the public too, one because it may eventually reduce the proportion of potential research funds spent on publication instead of research, the other because it may eventually increase technologically the use and usefulness of research publication, communication and collaboration. 

But both of these are potential secondary benefits of OA. The most important and urgent benefit of OA is the primary one: making research accessible to all of its potential users, not just to those who can afford subscription access. And that means Gratis, Green OA.

And that is why it is quite disappointing when OA advocates opt, today, for paid Gold OA over cost-free Green OA, or Libre OA over Gratis OA. They are opting for the eventual, potential secondary benefits of OA over the actual, primary and long overdue benefits of OA for research, researchers and the public.

And doubly ironic, because making sure Green Gratis OA is provided today, through global Green Gratis OA mandates by funders and institutions worldwide, is the fastest, surest and by far the most affordable way to get from the status quo today not only to the Gratis OA that will at long last fulfill the primary needs of research, researchers and the public today, but eventually also to the Libre and Gold OA that will fulfill the secondary needs and further potentials as well. Hence delaying or deterring the former in the service of the latter, by favouring paid Gold over cost-free Green, is a real head-shaker (to me, at least). and not a philosophical one...

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

Thank you, +Stevan Harnad, for your detailed reply. Especially the reasoning about priorities and using Green OA for the transition from subscription to Gold OA makes sense to me.

Two things are still not clear to me about your interview and I'd be glad if you could clarify them:

1. Don't Green OA mandates restrict the choice of journal/publisher as well? Not all publishers allow self-archiving...

2. Have you presented your patches to their policy directly to RCUK yet? And if you did, what was their reaction? If they left open that "loophole" for Hybrid OA accidentally, I think they should be welcoming your suggestions.

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Cameron Neylon:

+Richard Poynder 
You ask about costs. Realistically the transitional costs should be somewhere between nothing and maybe £15M pa for a few years. The £50M is in many ways a rather silly figure. But the real answer is that the worst case scenario is  we do 1.5% less research for a few years - and frankly that is in the noise. It's such a small figure in the overall research budget that it seems silly to worry about that when we know that there are much bigger inefficiencies that can be addressed by OA.

But even if it did cost £50M to deliver OA to all RCUK funded outputs from April next year, wouldn't that be a bargain? We can start to save several hundred million on subscriptions, start to address the nearly £1B of lost economic activity due to SMEs not having access, we can get efficiencies in the research process of maybe 10%, maybe 50%, maybe 100%. Even if that costs £200M over four years and if its restricted to the UK I'd say its still a bargain.

And that's what the RCUK policy, even in its current form delivers. Authors have precisely two choices. Go to a journal that offers a gold option and take it. Or go to a journal that offers a green option with no more than 6 month embargoes. It reduces author choice but so does any effective mandate. It's working for Wellcome so I think it can be made to work here as well. But bottom line the policy delivers OA to the UK's RC funded output from April 2013 with at worst a six month embargo. The only real risk is that publishers form a cartel to agree to charge high prices. And that cartel is already broken by a range of OA publishers who charge much less than the average.

What I find frustrating is that I actually agree that it would be a more effective policy would be to offer the option to go green if Gold is too expensive - at least in the short term. I'm arguing for this - the PLOS position supports this because I argued for it internally - and I'm talking to folks about the details of implementation and arguing for it with the relevant people. But the firebombing of comment threads, the shouting at people who should be our allies is making my job harder and strengthening the hand of the publishers to ask for more money, on weaker terms, because they can represent the OA movement as being unreasonable, shouty, and fragmented.

What would be helpful is clear rational argument that supports the principle direction of both Finch and RCUK towards OA as fast as possible, but offers advice on the implementation - rather than outright rejection or acceptance. Making the economic case for green based on real numbers and offer it as advice, not as a shouting match, to the people who are on our side. Telling those in government and RCUK who are expending significant political capital to drive the OA agenda that they are idiots is not helpful. Claiming that green is free is not helpful. Showing how it is a cost effective as a strategy, engaging with those people and giving them the detailed modelling of how costs would pan out, is. Offering to help game out the different ways policy might have an impact, is. But doing it constructively, not combatively, and NOT IN ALL CAPS!

And finally there needs to be more listening and understanding of other's positions and perspectives. Stevan says above he speaks for the interests of researchers but he doesn't represent mine. Access to the literature isn't a problem for me, I can get any paper I want if I put my mind to it, albeit (possibly) illegally. Discovery of the right literature is a problem, aggregation of data is a problem. Similarly you dismiss the potential for enhancing innovation in your reply to me, but that is the government perspective. If you don't engage with that then they will give up and move on, and we will probably get some half baked licensing or public library scheme. 

We need to stop claiming we talk for people and starting talking with people. There are many different interests served by OA, some served perfectly well by Green or Gratis and some that are not. For those of us with needs not served, Green could be a dangerous distraction, just as Gold looks this way for those who believe Green is the fastest route to universal access.

But it doesn't have to be this way - we can use the strengths of both approaches and each in our own way push on both routes as far and as fast as we can. There's no need for this to be competitive. Paying for Libre in no way diminishes the value of Gratis and nor does having Gratis diminish the value in continuing to push for Libre. And both Green and Gold approaches can be complementary in keeping transitional costs under control. We can have both, arguably we need both, so lets get on with enabling both and let the market and communities decide which route works for them.

I wrote a long comment originally and lost it in an inadvertent click. Then thought this was good because I should write something shorter...then wrote something longer

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

I definitely agree with Cameron that it's better to talk with people instead of for people. Funders, OA publishers and researchers ultimately have the same goal, they just prefer different routes to it. That should not keep them from working together to reach the goal, though.

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Stevan Harnad:

REPAIRING THE RCUK MANDATE
Reply to +Thomas Pfeiffer

+Thomas Pfeiffer: "Don't Green OA mandates restrict the choice of journal/publisher as well?"

60% of journals formally recognize the author's right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA. Many of the remaining 40% ask for a Green OA embargo of 6-12 months. Some journals have embargoes of longer than 12 months.

Before the UK government gave all publishers the strong incentive -- by promising, as per the recommendations of the Finch Committee, to take the money to pay for it out of research funds -- to provide a Hybrid Gold OA option and make their Green OA embargoes much longer, to ensure that authors pay for Gold rather than provide cost-free Green, an ID/OA mandate with a maximal embargo of 6-12 months on Green OA would have been feasible, with minimal restriction on journal choice and maximal incentive on journals to minimize or eliminate their embargoes.

But now that the word is out that not only are the extra Gold OA funds to be there for the asking, but that RCUK even obliges authors to pick paid Gold over cost-free Green if Gold is offered, it is no longer possible for RCUK to require a maximum 6-12 month embargo length on Green OA.

The only way to fix the broken RCUK mandate with its perverse incentives and disincentive now is to urge rather than to require a maximum OA embargo of 6-12 months.

What a repaired RCUK mandate can require is:

PATCH 1: Repository deposit (with no exceptions) of the final refereed draft ,immediately upon acceptance for publication, by all fundees, irrespective of journal, urging that access to the deposit should be set as OA immediately if possible, or, at latest, 6 months after deposit (12 for AHRC and ESRC if necessary). (Meanwhile the repository's "email-eprint-request" Button can tide over research user needs during the embargo period by providing "Almost OA" with one click from the requester and one click from the author.)

That applies pressure on authors and journals for short or no embargoes, but it does not prevent authors from publishing in their journal of choice.

In addition:

PATCH 2: The condition that if the journal offers both Gold and Green the author must choose Gold should be dropped completely.

PATCH 3: Funds are available to pay to publish in a Gold OA journal, but only pure-Gold journals, not hybrid subscription/Gold.

+Thomas Pfeiffer: "Have you presented your patches to their policy directly to RCUK yet?"

RCUK did not consult me in designing their policy (though I did have some indirect information from some of the people RCUK did consult).

I have posted PATCH 1 and 2 prominently now. They are simple enough so that if there is a will to fix the policy, I trust that they can and will be done.

PATCH 3 is highly advisable, if there is the will for it, though, unlike 1 & 2 it is not absolutely essential.

---

Stevan Harnad:

PRIORITIES, AGAIN
Reply to @Cameron Neylon
"TRANSITIONAL COSTS": It is not at all clear to me what Cameron's speculations about transitional costs of "between nothing and maybe £15M pa for a few years" are based on.

(I'm also not sure how "the worst case scenario is we do 1.5% less research for a few years - and frankly that is in the noise" would wash with researchers, even if were right on the money.)

Does anyone seriously imagine that if the UK, with its 6% of world research output, mandates Gold OA then all journals will convert to pure-Gold OA to accommodate the RCUK mandate?

Assuming the answer is no (and that Cameron does not imagine that all UK authors will therefore drop their existing journals and flock to the existing Gold OA journals), the only remaining option is hybrid Gold.

It is certainly conceivable (indeed virtually certain) that under the irresistible incentive of the current RCUK mandate virtually all journals will quickly come up with a Hybrid Gold option: What is also conceivable is that some journals will offer a discounted hybrid Gold option ("membership") to authors at universities that subscribe to that journal: Maybe even free hybrid Gold for those authors, as long as their university subscribes again the next year.

But that isn't a transition scenario, it's a subscription deal. It locks in current subscription rates and revenues and provides Gold OA for authors from subscribing institutions. How many papers? And what about authors from non-subscribing institutions? And how does this scale, globally and across time?

Subscriptions are sold and sustained on the demand by an institution for the whole of a journal's contents. But an institution's published papers per journal vary from year to year and from institution to institution, What is an institution's incentive to keep subscribing at a fixed rate? Especially if -- mirabile dictu -- the global proportion of Gold OA articles were to go up? (Reminder: You don't need a subscription to access those Gold articles!)

Publishers can do this simple reckoning too. So it is much more likely that the "quick" Hybrid Gold offered by most journals under RCUK pressure will not be based on free Gold OA for subscribers, but on charging extra for Gold OA. How much? It's up to the journal, since the mandate is just that if Gold is offered, it must be picked and paid for, if the journal is picked.

So the likelihood is that journals will charge a lot. (They already charge a lot for Gold OA.) The price per article is likely to be closer to 1/Nth of their gross revenues per article for a journal that publishes N articles per year. If they get that much per RCUK article, then that will bring in 6% more than their prior gross revenue annually, thanks to the UK's largesse..

We can speculate on how much publishers might reduce this 1/N, in order to hedge their bets, on the off-chance that it could also catch on in some other countries whose pockets full of spare research funds are not quite as deep as the UK's -- but why are we speculating like this? No one knows what will happen if UK authors are forced to pay for Gold and journals happily offer them hybrid Gold at an asking-price of the journal's choosing.

What's sure is that this kind of "transition" doesn't scale -- because other countries don't have the spare change to pay for OA this way -- and especially because it is still evident for those who are still thinking straight that OA can be provided, completely free of any extra cost whilst subscriptions are paying for publication, by mandating Green OA rather than paying pre-emptively for a "transition" to Gold OA.

And certainly not paying in order to enjoy the legendary benefits of Libre OA -- for authors who can't even be bothered to provide Gratis OA unless it is mandated! (At least every researcher today, both as author and user, has a concrete sense of the frustration of gratis-access denial as a non-subscriber: How many researchers have the faintest idea of what they are missing for lack of getting or giving libre OA re-use rights?)

I would also appreciate an explanation from Cameron of the reason behind his suggestion that "even if it did cost £50M to deliver OA to all RCUK funded outputs from April next year, wouldn't that be a bargain? We can start to save several hundred million on subscriptions":

Does Cameron imagine that UK institutions only subscribe to journals in order to gain access to their own UK research output? (Or has Cameron forgotten about hybrid Gold OA again?)

+Cameron Neylon: "It's working for Wellcome so I think it can be made to work here as well."

Is it? And if Wellcome pays to make all its funded research Gold OA, does that take care of Wellcome authors' access to research other than Wellcome-funded research?

+Cameron Neylon: "The only real risk is that publishers form a cartel to agree to charge high prices. And that cartel is already broken by a range of OA publishers who charge much less than the average."

Is that so? Are you not forgetting Hybrid Gold again? And authors' disinclination to give up their journal of choice in order to have to pay scarce research money for a Gold OA that they had to be mandated to act as if they wanted?

Being mandated to do a few extra keystrokes (to provide Green OA) as a condition of receiving research funding is one thing (and a familiar one), but having to give up your journal of choice and to shell out scarce research money (or possibly even some of your own dosh) is quite another.

+Cameron Neylon: "a more effective [RCUK] policy would be to offer the option to go green if Gold is too expensive… I'm… arguing for it with the relevant people"

Putting an arbitrary price-limit on the Gold fee is no solution for the profound flaw in the current RCUK policy. How much more than cost-free is "too expensive"? And why?

+Cameron Neylon: "the firebombing of comment threads… is making my job harder"

Thinking things through first might make it easier -- maybe even consulting those who might have thought them through already. ;>)

+Cameron Neylon: "Claiming that green is free is not helpful"

But while subscriptions are paying the cost of publishing in full, and fulsomely, it is, helpful or not, a fact.

+Cameron Neylon: "Showing how [Green] is cost effective as a strategy, engaging with those people and giving them the detailed modelling of how costs would pan out, is [helpful]."

I believe that's precisely what Alma Swan and John Houghton did, and their modelling and recommendations were ignored in the Finch and RCUK recommendations. Their recommendation was to mandate Green, not to pay pre-emptively for Gold. And they showed that the benefit/cost ratio was far higher for Green than Gold in the transition phase. (Post-Green Gold is another story, but we have to get there first; and the calculations confirm that mandating Green -- not paying pre-emptively for Gold while still paying for subscriptions -- is the way to get there from here.)

+Cameron Neylon: "Offering to help game out the different ways policy might have an impact, is [helpful]."

I offer to help.

Till now I have not been consulted in advance, so I have had no choice but to give my assessment after the policy (both Finch and RCUK) was announced as a fait accompli. My assessment was extremely negative, because both policies are just dreadful, and their defects are obvious.

But RCUK, at least, is easily reparable. I've described how. I'm happy to explain it to any policy-maker willing to listen to me.

(And if RCUK is fixed, that will indirectly fix Finch.)

+Cameron Neylon: "Stevan says above he speaks for the interests of researchers but he doesn't represent mine. Access to the literature isn't a problem for me, I can get any paper I want if I put my mind to it, albeit (possibly) illegally."

Cameron, that response does not scale, nor is it representative.

+Cameron Neylon: "Discovery of the right literature is a problem"

The only reason discovery of the right literature is a problem is that most of it is not yet OA! You can't "discover" what is not there, or not accessible. That's why we need Green (Gratis) OA mandates.

+Cameron Neylon: "you dismiss the potential for enhancing innovation in your reply to me, but that is the government perspective"

Cameron, you know as well as I do that "the government" could not explain what the slogan "potential for enhancing innovation" means to save its life. "The government" gets fed these slogans and buzzwords and "perspectives" by its advisors and lobbyists and spin-doctors.

Yes, it's near-miraculous that "the government" express any interest in OA at all. But it's up to those who actually know what they are talking about to go on to explain to them what it means, and what to do about it.

And anyone who still has his feet on the ground (rather than levitating on gold dust or rights rapture) knows that what is needed first and foremost, and as a necessary precondition for anything further, is Gratis OA (free online access), globally. We're nowhere near having it yet; and if RCUK persists in its present fatally flawed form, we'll have (at the very best) UK Gold OA (raising worldwide OA by 6% from about 22% to about 28%) plus a local, unscalable policy. (More likely, we will simply have a failed mandate, non-compliant authors, a lot of money and time wasted, and the UK no longer leading the worldwide OA movement, as it had been doing for the past 8 years.)

+Cameron Neylon: "There are many different interests served by OA, some served perfectly well by Green or Gratis and some that are not. For those of us with needs not served, Green could be a dangerous distraction, just as Gold looks this way for those who believe Green is the fastest route to universal access."

You seem to be conflating Libre and Gold here Cameron, but never mind. Gratis is for those who need free online access. Libre is for those who need free online access plus certain re-use rights. Green is for those who don't want to wait for all journals to go Gold and don't have the money to pay for Gold pre-emptively at today's asking prices while subscriptions are still being paid for. Gold is for those who are galled by subscription prices (and have other sources of money).

Gratis and Libre come as either Green or Gold, but Green has no extra cost (while subscriptions are being paid); and Libre is much harder to get subscription publishers to agree to. Moreover, all four include Gratis as a necessary condition.

So without tying oneself up into speculative and ideological knots (or a transport of gold fever or rights rapture), it looks as if Gratis OA via cost-free Green OA mandates are the way to go for now (with ID/OA and the Button mooting embargoes).

The rest (Libre, Gold) will come after we've mandated and provided Gratis Green globally. To insist on Libre Gold locally in the UK now, by paying extra for it pre-emptively, is just a way of ensuring that the UK no longer has a scalable global solution for OA at all. And without global Gratis OA at least, the UK's dearly purchased Gold amounts to Fool's Gold, insofar as UK access is concerned. (And remember way back, Cameron: Open Access was about access!)

+Cameron Neylon: "There's no need for this to be competitive. Paying for Libre in no way diminishes the value of Gratis and nor does having Gratis diminish the value in continuing to push for Libre. And both Green and Gold approaches can be complementary in keeping transitional costs under control. We can have both, arguably we need both"

I'm all for going for both -- as long as cost-free Green Gratis OA is mandated and Libre Gold is a bonus option one can choose if one wishes and has the money to pay for it. Not, as RCUK currently has it, where the author may not choose Green if a journal offers Gold. That is just fatal foolishness, aka, Fool's Gold.

---

The claim is often made that researchers (peers) have as much access to peer-reviewed research publications as they need -- that if there is any need for further access at all, it is not the peers who need it, but the general public.

1. Functionally, it doesn't matter whether open access (OA) is provided for peers or for public, because OA means that everyone gets access.

2. Strategically, however, it does matter, because currently OA is not being provided in anywhere near sufficient numbers spontaneously by researchers (peers).

3. This means that policies (mandates) from peers' institutions and funders are needed to induce peers to provide OA to their publications.

4. This means that credible and valid reasons must be found for peers' institutions and funders to mandate providing OA.

5. For some fields of research -- especially health-relevant research -- public access is a strong reason for public funders to mandate providing public access.

6. But that still leaves all the rest of research, in all disciplines, funded and unfunded.

7. Most research is technical, intended to be used and applied by peer researchers in building further research and applications -- to the benefit of the general public.

8. But most peer-reviewed research reports themselves are neither understandable nor of direct interest to the general public as reading matter.

9. Hence, for most research, "public access to publicly funded research," is not reason enough for providing OA, nor for mandating that OA be provided.

10. The evidence that the primary intended users of peer-reviewed research -- researchers -- do not have anywhere near enough access is two-fold:

11. For many years, the ARL published statistics on the journal subscription/license access of US research universities:

12. The small fraction of all peer-reviewed journals that any university can afford to access via subscriptions/licenses has since become even smaller, despite the "Big Deals":

13. The latest evidence comes from the university that can afford the largest fraction of journals: Harvard University

14. Researchers' careers and funding as well as research progress depend on the accessibility, uptake and impact of the research output.

15. Open Access maximizes accessibility and enhances uptake and impact.

16. Hence peer access, rather than just public access, is the reason (all) researchers (funded and unfunded, in all disciplines) should provide OA -- and the reason their institutions and funders should mandate that they provide OA.

Stevan Harnad
Enabling Open Scholarship

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Postscript:

The list of recommendations I made was strategic. The objective was to maximize OA deposits and maximize OA deposit mandates.

The issue is not about how many members of the general public might wish to read how many peer-reviewed journal articles.

The issue is strategic: What provides a viable, credible, persuasive reason for researchers to provide OA and for institutions and funders to mandate providing OA in all fields of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines.

My point was that providing access for the the general public is a viable, credible, persuasive reason for providing and mandating OA in some fields (notably health- related research, but there may be other fields as well) -- but it is not a viable, credible, persuasive reason for providing OA in all fields, nor for all research.

It is not difficult to find anecdotal evidence of nonspecialist interest in specialized research; one's own interests often go beyond one's own area of expertise.

But that is user-based reasoning, whereas providing OA and mandating OA require reasons that are viable, credible and persuasive to providers of research -- and not some providers, sometimes, but all providers, for all research.

The only reason for providing OA to research that is valid, credible and persuasive for all research and researchers is in order to ensure that it is accessible to all of its intended users -- primarily peers -- and not just to those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published.

The issue is strategic. It is a great mistake to construe giving priority to reasons for providing peer access over reasons for providing public access as somehow implying that public access should be denied: Public access automatically comes with the territory with OA. So public access denial is not the issue.

The strategic issue is whether researchers (and their institutions and funders) are more likely to be induced to provide and mandate OA by the argument that the public wants and needs access or by the argument that peers want and need access.

Peer access provides research progress and impact. It is an appeal to researchers' self-interest to stress the beneficial effects of OA on the uptake and impact of their research.

Most researchers of course also have a secret yearning that their research should appeal not only to their peers, but to the general public. But they also know that that is probably just wishful thinking in most cases. And in any case, public access does not have the direct affect on their careers, funding, and research progress that peer access has.

So it is not that the enhancement of public access should not be listed among the reasons for providing OA. It is just that it should not be promoted as the first, foremost, or universal reason for providing OA, because it is not: for many or most researchers, that argument simply will not work.

Ditto for the argument that researchers need to provide OA because journal subscriptions cost too much. The eventual solution to the journal affordability crisis will probably also come from providing and mandating OA. But, like public access, journal affordability is not a sufficiently compelling or universal rationale for providing OA.

The public access rationale for providing OA appeals to politicians and voters. Good. Use it in order to help get OA mandate legistlation adopted by research funders. But the rationale is much less convincing to researchers (peers) themselves, and their institutions.

The journal affordability rationale for providing OA appeals to librarians and institutions, but it is much less convincing to researchers (peers).

In contrast, providing OA in order to maximize research progress and impact, by maximizing researcher (peer) uptake, usage, applications and citations -- if backed up by evidence -- is the way to convince all researchers, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines, that it is in their own best interests to provide OA to their research.

Stevan Harnad

In "Open Access Doubts" Eric F. Van de Velde lists some doubts about open access (OA).

There are very simple answers to each of Eric's doubts. The doubts arise mostly from a library-based rather than a research-based perception of the OA problem and its solution.

There is only one doubt that is most definitely justified, though Eric has not expressed it: Researchers themselves -- even though they and their research are the primary losers because of access-denial, and the primary beneficiaries of providing OA -- are not providing OA in sufficient numbers until and unless it is mandated by their institutions and funders.

That does raise some doubts, but not about the feasibility or benefits of OA -- only about the alertness of researchers to their own needs and the way to meet them.

EV:
Assessing the ongoing Open Access experiment, where are our doubts? I have three:

Is Affordable Better than Free?

Affordable is not better than free because even if journal subscriptions were sold at cost, with no profit margin at all, not all or even most institutions could afford to subscribe to all or even most peer-reviewed journals.

The purpose of OA is to provide online access to all would-be users, not just to those whose institutions can afford a subscription to the journal in which it was published.

Eric is conflating the journal affordability and the research accessibility problems.

EV:
A robust and user-friendly network of open scholarly systems seems farther away than ever because of inexpertly formatted content and bad, incomplete, and non-public (!) metadata.

No, researchers are not being denied access to peer-reviewed research because of "inexpertly formatted content and bad, incomplete, and non-public (!) metadata" but because of content to which (a) their institution cannot afford access and (b) that has not been made OA at all.

It is librarians who worry about formatting and metadata! Researchers worry about inaccessible content.

EV:
While there is always room for improvement, pay-walled journals provide professionally formatted and organized content with excellent metadata and robust services. The problem is cost. Unfortunately, we did nothing to reduce cost. We only negotiated prices.

Cost is not the OA problem: Access-denial is. Lowering cost is a library's goal. Gaining access is the user's need. And even lowering prices to cost-without-any-profit does not remedy access-denial

EV:
The root of the problem is site licenses... Site licenses are market-distorting products that preserve paper-era business processes of publishers, aggregators, and libraries.

No, the root of the problem is access-denial and the solution is access-provision. And the way to provide OA is for authors to self-archive their refereed final drafts ("green OA"). And the way to ensure that authors self-archive is to mandate it.

EV:
Universities can cut the Gordian knot right now by replacing site licenses with direct subsidies to researchers…Researchers, empowered to make individual price-value judgments, would become consumers in a suddenly competitive market for content and information services.

Instead of mandating green OA (cost-free), cancel all subscriptions and give the funds to researchers, and the market will take care of the rest?

Eric, when many of us are struggling to get something concrete and practical that has already been tried, tested, and proven effective -- namely, green OA mandates -- to be implemented by more institutions after 15 years of needlessly lost research access and impact, I don't think this is the opportune time to try or even contemplate rather speculative hypotheses!

EV:
What are the Goals of Institutional Repositories?

Open Access advocates have articulated at least five goals for institutional repositories: (1) release hidden information, (2) rein in journal prices, (3) archive an institution’s scholarly record, (4) enable fast research communication, and (5) provide free access to author-formatted articles.

If "release hidden information" (1) means provide online access to refereed research to which access is currently denied to users at non-subscribing institutions, then this is the one and only fundamental rationale for OA, and has been ever since the online era made it feasible. (But I'm afraid this might not even be what Eric means by "release hidden information"!)

EV:
The other four goals are secondary ones: If all refereed research is (green) OA, whether or not it reins in journal prices (2) is secondary, since all users have access, whether or not their institutions can afford to buy access.

An institution's scholarly record is already "archived" in the journals in which is was published (3) (all of them are now online and archived at the publisher's toll-gated website). The trouble is that the institution itself has no record of its own research output. (Mandating green OA provides that.)

OA doesn't just speed up research communication and progress (4), it maximizes research progress (by making it accessible to researchers who are otherwise denied access). That's not just speed: it's access and hence uptake, usage and impact.

And the purpose of OA is to provide free access for all would-be users, whether or not their institutions can afford paid access to the publisher's version of record. Access to the author's refereed final draft (5) may sound like less than perfect for a librarian, but it is the difference between night and day for an otherwise access-denied researcher.

EV:
Institutional repositories are ideal vehicles for releasing hidden information that, until recently, had no suitable distribution platform (1).

This is a profound error and misunderstanding: The fundamental reason for providing OA is to "release" published information that was only accessible to users at subscribing institutions rather than to all would-be users. It is not about information that had "no suitable distribution platform." (Although pre-refereeing papers, other kinds of research content, and even the "grey" literature are all welcome in repositories too, OA's first and foremost target content is refereed, published research.)

EV:
Institutional repositories fall short as a mechanism to rein in journal prices (2), because they are not a credible alternative for the current archival scholarly record.

Eric is conflating "gold" OA publishing with green OA self-archiving here: Green OA is a supplement, not a substitute, for refereed research journals. No "credible alternative intended": just a remedy for access-denial.

And the goal of OA itself is not to "rein in journal prices" but to provide online access for all users, not just the ones whose institutions can afford the journal prices.

So Eric is again conflating the problem of journal affordability with the problem of research accessibility.

EV:
Without (2), goals (3), (4), and (5) are irrelevant. If we pay for journals anyway, we can achieve (3) by maintaining a database of links to the formal literature. Secure in the knowledge that their journals are not in jeopardy, publishers would be happy to provide (4) and (5).

Without lowering prices, access-denial to users whose institutions cannot afford subscriptions is irrelevant?

Keep paying their subscriptions and journals will provide access for those who can't afford to pay for it?

Perhaps what Eric means is that if all subscribing institutions promised to keep paying the asking price in perpetuo, then journals would agree to make all their contents OA?

But who would (or could) make such a (foolish) promise?

EV:
A scenario consistent with this analysis is unfolding right now. The HEP community launched a rescue mission for HEP journals, which lost much of their role to arXiv.

The HEP community is the only one in the world that has already provided (green) OA for itself without the need for a mandate. Hence there is effectively no more access denial worldwide for the HEP subset of the journal literature. The HEP community has effectively solved its accessibility problem.

What the HEP community does as a follow-up, to address the affordability problem, is of far less concern and relevance to the rest of the scholarly and scientific community, which is still afflicted with access denial (and its resulting loss in research usage, progress and impact). What the non-HEP world needs is OA.

But it should be mentioned that the SCOAP3 project is effectively the one that I called into question above: No institution can or will guarantee that it will keep paying for subscriptions in perpetuo. So the jury is still out on whether such a scheme is sustainable. But we already know it is not scalable beyond HEP, because the non-HEP world has not yet even taken the first essential step, which is to provide green OA.

That's why green OA mandates are needed.

Publishing reform will take care of itself after OA has (green) become universal -- not before.

EV:
The SCOAP3 initiative pools funds currently spent on site-licensing HEP journals. This strikes me as a heavy-handed approach to protect existing revenue streams of established journals. On the other hand, SCOAP3 protects the quality of the HEP archival scholarly record and converts HEP journals to the open-access model.

SCOAP3 is a consortial "membership" solution about whose sustainability and scalability there are, as noted, good reasons to have doubts.

But it is irrelevant. Because HEP already has (green) OA, unmandated, whereas the rest of the scholarly and scientific world does not.

EV:
Are Open-Access Journals a Form of Vanity Publishing?

If a journal’s scholarly discipline loses influence or if its editorial board lowers its standards, the journal’s standing diminishes and various quality assessments fall.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).
ABSTRACT:Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4): 86-93
ABSTRACT:Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA.

EV:
“Stevan: Remember, I am an OA supporter”

Eric, I know (and an old friend and comrade-at-arms!)...

EV:
“though I am getting discouraged about the slow progress.”

Me too (though I've been discouraged about that for about 15 years now...).

EV:
“You raise good points, but I think you are the one conflating issues. I will try to keep them separate. 1. Journal pricing: Independent of OA, it is important to take the cost of scholarly publishing down.”

Independent of OA. (So who's conflating now? Your doubts were billed as being about OA, not about the cost of scholarly publishing...

EV:
“The argument I made in earlier blog posts is that site licenses are the root cause of the cost problem.”

The affordability problem: not the accessibility problem.

EV:
“It is time for libraries to get out of the banal role of middleman, and let researchers manage their own subscriptions. You call that a speculative hypothesis. I call it restoring a real free market...”

Speculative or non-speculative, it is not the research accessibility problem, and it does not solve it.

EV:
“I agree that Green Open Access would solve the access problem... provided everyone joins the initiative. The problem is, too few are joining”

The way to get everyone to join is for all institutions and funders to mandate it.

EV:
“and because of quality control issues too difficult to use.”

What is too difficult to use? I have no trouble using the OA content that's there. The problem is that most of it (85%) isn't there. That's why the mandates are needed.

EV:
“The mandate movement is getting some traction, but most mandates come with loopholes.”

You're right, so now EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is working to guide institutions on how to optimize those mandates by getting rid of their loopholes: http://bit.ly/EOSoaPolicy

EV:
“So, I am getting discouraged. I wonder when patience runs out.”

My patience ran out long ago! (For some perverse reason, I'm still plugging away at it...)

EV:
“We both agree that Green Open Access does not solve the cost problem of journals.”

And it is not intended to. It is intended to solve the access problem of researchers.

EV:
“You say that journal prices do not matter with Green OA in place. I say they do, because universities end up underwriting two overlapping systems... Admittedly, Green OA is the better bargain. But if Green OA is not reducing the cost of the other, it just adds to the total cost.”

1. Green OA's cost per paper deposited is negligible. With 100% deposit (because of 100% mandates), even lower.

2. Green OA, if mandated, can provide 100% OA, solving 100% of the accessibility problem.

3. The journal affordability problem is not the same problem, and we've agreed not to conflate them (remember?).

EV:
“In the one example in which Green OA is near universal [SCPAP3], scholars are working hard to make sure their journals can maintain their current revenue stream.”

That's their problem and their look-out (because we've agreed not to conflate, right?). I've many times cautioned that SCOAP3 is premature, unnecessary, unscalable and unsustainable. But I don't care if I'm ignored: I'm too busy being ignored on how to solve the accessibility problem to worry about being ignored on how not to solve the affordability problem!

EV:
“There may be no explicit promise to maintain current subscriptions, but there certainly is an implicit one.”

An implicit promise there are strong reasons to expect that they cannot and will not keep, in the long term: http://bit.ly/ScoapCope But, again, that's another problem, not my problem, not the accessibility problem.

EV:
“Current academics are scared to lose the formal scholarly record in its current form and the editorial boards that control the refereeing process.”

Academics (and research itself) both need peer review. Journals provide the peer review. (In the online era, they need no longer provide access and the archival record, but they do that too. Eventually they won't have to.) But just as OA is not the journal affordability problem, it is not the problem of the future of publishing either. Green OA changes none of this: It just solves the accessibility problem.

EV:
“they are convinced that the journals in which they publish and on whose editorial boards they sit deserve to survive.”

They are right.

EV:
“It is the other journals, the ones in which they do not publish and on whose boards they do not sit, that are too costly and should disappear.”

This is a bit simplistic: Researchers want their quality journals, and they want the journals they read and publish in (all three are not always the same). Providing (and mandating) green OA does not change any of this (though it might eventually induce downsizing to peer review alone, and conversion to the gold OA model to recover peer review's much lower costs):

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.
ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.

EV:
“Free markets are set up to deal with exactly this kind of problem. The current system takes end users out of the price-value evaluation and has led to an unrestricted growth of the scholarly literature.”

How have you managed to draw me into a discussion of journal pricing and affordability, Eric, when we had agreed we were not going to conflate that with the OA problem? ;>)

EV:
“So, by all means, continue Green OA. However, also bring a real free market to the scholarly-journal business.”

But Eric, I'm also strongly in favor of putting an end to our unnecessary and cruel slaughter of animals in order to please our palates - but I don't conflate that with OA either! Why must I speculate about the scholarly-journal business when all I want is that institutions and funders should mandate green OA self-archiving?

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)

JISC-Commissioned Report By:

Alma Swan
University of Southampton
EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) &
Key Perspectives
How to build a business case for an Open Access policy

Full version of the report

Podcast interview with Alma Swan and Neil Jacobs


A new report launched today (25 February 2010) shows how universities can work out how much they could save on their profit and loss accounts as well as increasing their contribution to UK plc when they share their research papers through Open Access.

The ‘modelling scholarly communication options: costs and benefits for universities’ report, written by Alma Swan, is based on different types of university. It shows how universities might reduce costs, how they can calculate these saving and their greater contribution to society by following an Open Access route.

Neil Jacobs, programme manager at JISC says, “This is the first time that universities will have a method and practical examples from which to build a business case for Open Access and to calculate the cost to them of the scholarly communications process. For example working out the value of researchers carrying out peer-reviewing duties or the comparative costs of the library handling of journals subscribed to in print, electronically, or in both formats.

“As universities such as Edinburgh, Salford and UCL lead the world to mandate self-archiving and adopt Open Access policies, this report gives evidence to help universities make informed decisions about how their research is disseminated. There are still issues to overcome and the benefits of adopting an Open Access route can be seen through economies of scale, the more researchers disseminate their work through this route the greater the benefits.”

The key findings from the report show:

• The annual savings in research and library costs of a university repository model combined with subscription publishing could range from £100,000 to £1,320,000

• Moving from Open Access journals and subscription-funding to per-article Open Access journal funding has the potential to achieve savings for universities between £620,000 per year and £1,700,000 per year if the article-processing charge is set at £500 or less

• Savings from a change away from subscription-funding to per-article Open Access journal funding were estimated to be between £170,000 and £1,365,000 per year for three out of the four universities studied when the article-processing charge is £1000 per article or less

• For the remaining university in the study a move from subscription-funding to the per-article Open Access journal funding saw the university having to pay £1.86m more in this scenario

Jacobs adds: “While some research intensive universities may pay more for the subscription-funding to per-article Open Access journal scenario, it should be noted that many research funders, including the Research Councils and Wellcome Trust, may contribute article-processing charges as a part of normal research grants, so that all universities have a potential source of income to cover the majority of such costs.

“JISC is working with partners in the sector to overcome the barriers which exist to adopting Open Access.”

The report focussed on three approaches to Open Access:

Open access journals - content freely available online using a business model that does not rely on subscriptions

Open access repositories – the current subscription-based system is supplemented by the provision of Open Access articles in repositories

Open access repositories with overlay services – content is collected in repositories and service providers carry out the publishing services necessary, for example the peer-review process

Martin Hall, Vice Chancellor at the University of Salford says: “We have recently implemented an Open Access mandate to self-archive. The reason we decided to adopt this approach is that evidence shows that research published online has higher citations and can also be used as a way to promote our competitiveness internationally.”

If you’re looking to implement an Open Access policy here are four aspects to consider:

• Consult across the whole the university on the barriers and benefits of implementing an Open Access policy

• Promote the Open Access policy and procedures to all staff to provide researchers with clear guidance on the opportunities open to them.

• Invest in a university repository; the small investment in setting one up will yield benefits in managing and sharing a university’s research outputs

• Set up financial processes to manage income and expenditure for Open Access publication charges; this will help researchers publish in Open Access journals

Supporting materials:

• How to build a case for university policies and practices in support of Open Access

• Publishing research papers: which policy will deliver best value for your university

The report was commissioned by JISC and written by Alma Swan of EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), Key Perspectives and University of Southampton.

Full version of the report

Podcast interview with Alma Swan and Neil Jacobs

My gratitude to Iryna Kuchma for having pointed out my error, and my sincere apologies to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for having thought otherwise, even for a moment! (I ought to have known, for I had registered the CAS mandate and announced it on 19 August 2009!)

Unlike the Netherlands, U California, U. Goettingen, Max-Planck Institutes, the COPE members, and indeed SCOAP3, the Chinese Academy of Sciences did indeed first mandate Green OA, before committing to pay for Gold OA.

This policy is exemplary and unexceptionable. Let's hope the rest of the world will follow it. (And shame on me for having imagined otherwise!)

Ten years after the creation of the OAI interoperability protocol, 20 years after the creation of the Web and 40 years after the creation of the Net we are still light years from doing what it would take each of us only a few keystrokes to do overnight: freeing our refereed research online.

It is too late now to do it early, but it's never too late to do it...