Open Access Archivangelism - Institutional Repositories

Against Publisher Deposit in Institutional Repositories

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 05:56:36 +0100

Institutional agreements with publishers on proxy deposit into institutional repositories are an extremely bad idea, for a number of reasons:

1. The only sure way to achieve 100% open access is to have a rational, systematically verifiable system of deposit and monitoring.

2. Institutions are the providers of all research output, whether published in OA journals or subscription journals.

3. Spontaneous, unmandated OA self-archiving by authors is growing much too slowly.

4. The only way to accelerate OA to 100% is for authors' institiutions and funders to mandate OA self-archiving.

5. Institutions are the only ones in a position to systematically monitor and ensure OA mandate compliance, such that all of their research output is self-archived in their institutional repository.

6. If some deposits are institutional and some are institution-external (central), and some deposits are done by authors and some by publishers, it makes it impossible or extremely complicated to systematically monitor and ensure that all research output is deposited.

7. Self-archiving in the institutional repository immediately upon publication hence has to be made a mandatory part of the standard research work-flow for all institutional researchers (just a few extra keystrokes per paper upon acceptance for publication). (Even librarian proxy deposit is not a good idea.)

8. Instead allowing or encouraging publishers to do the deposit -- either paid OA publishers, or subscription publishers after their self-imposed embargoes have elapsed -- takes the control of OA provision out of the hands of authors and institutions, and leaves it in the hands of publishers.

Hence it is a far more effective and far-sighted strategy for institutions to adopt effective, systematic, verifiable institutional OA self-archiving mandates (reinforced by funder mandates) than to be drawn into any side-deals with publishers, whether OA publishers or subscription publishers. (To do so is a Trojan Horse or a Faustian Bargain -- take your pick of metaphors!.)

Institutional Repository "Business Model" for Open Access Publishing?

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:59:19 +0000

There is a profound latent conflation and incoherence in the question "What is the business model to support open access through institutional repositories?"

It is a conflation between the business model for publishing and the "business" model for institutional repositories (IRs).

The conflation is also evident in any mention (in the context of IR costs) of peer review costs or of reviving university presses linked to repositories.

1. Green OA self-archiving is not a substitute for peer-reviewed subscription journal publishing: it is a supplement to it, for the purpose of providing access to all users, rather than just to subscribers.

2. The function (and cost) of (the editorial management of) journal peer review is neither an institutional repository function (and cost) nor a university function (or cost).

3. Institutional repositories provide access (only) to their own research output.

4. Hence the notion of their doing their own peer review would amounts to a vanity press (self-publication).

5. Alternatively, if a university press produces a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research from other institutions, then that's just another Gold OA journal, not an IR function or cost.

Please let us not be drawn into the fuzzy notions of certain critics of OA or of Green OA IRs, with hazy, incoherent questions about "business models" that naively conflate IR functions with publishing functions.

IRs are created for many different purposes (some sensible, some not), Green OA being only one of those purposes. (Elaborate local IR search is a foolish function, for example; search will always take place at the multi-IR harvester level. Digital preservation is also not a straightforward function for institutional journal article output, at least not yet: Green OA IRs archive authors' final drafts, for access-supplemental purposes: that is not the draft that requires the preservation: the publisher's version of record is!)

IRs also store all sorts of other institutional objects, data and records. Those functions and their costs have nothing to do with OA and it is absurd for OA policy-makers to ask for a Green IR "business model" that includes those costs and functions.

Yet the IR start-up and maintenance costs (small though they are) are already covered in large part by the institutional sectors that require those non-OA IR functions. (I say "in large part" because without effective Green OA mandates, the Green OA content and function of IRs is minimal.)

Houghton & Swan's (2013) cost/benefit analyses stress that Green OA is a transitional strategy: It supplements subscription publishing and its costs by providing OA.

Houghton & Swan also have cost/benefit estimates for pure Gold OA publication, once subscriptions are gone.

But the question of "IR business model" cuts across these two, incoherently, as if they were both happening at the same time, which makes no sense whatsoever.

I have a more specific hypothesis about how this Green to Gold transition is likely to take place. At the very least, this hypothetical scenario has the virtue of keeping the respective expenses and "business models" in their proper places in the likely temporal sequence, rather than conflating them incoherently, in parallel:

I. Subscriptions prevail, as now.

II. Green OA is universally mandated, by institutions and funders.

III. Green OA grows (anarchically, article by article, not systematically, journal by journal).

IV. So subscriptions continue to co-exist with Green OA, as Green OA grows, because journals cannot be cancelled by institutions until all or most of their contents are available to their users by another means (Green OA).

V. Once there is enough Green OA to make subscription cancellations significant (or even earlier), journals will have to prepare for the transition, by phasing out obsolete products and services, and their costs:

VI. The print edition and its costs will be phased out first. Then, once subscriptions approach unsustainability, the online edition (and its costs) will be phased out, and both access-provision and archiving (and their costs) will be offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA IRs.

VII. But the costs of access-provision and archiving will already be distributed across the worldwide network of Green OA IRs: the only difference will be that the Green OA final refereed draft will become the version of record.

VIII. Publishers' only remaining cost will be the editorial management of peer review.

IX. To cover this last remaining cost, publishers will convert to Gold OA, and institutions will pay for it, per outgoing article, out of a fraction of their subscription cancelation savings.

X. But publishing (peer review) and its costs will remain autonomous from the distributed IR access-provision and archiving and its costs.

Hence the pre-emptive call for a Green IR "business model" at this time is both unrealistic and incoherent, showing a lack of understanding (or a simplistic misunderstanding) if what is really going on.

"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in 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 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." [emphasis added]
Houghton & Swan (2013)

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on Going for Gold D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

Arxiv Users: Think Beyond the Narrow Confines of Your Discipline

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:39:38 +0000

An astrophysicist has made the tongue-in-chief proposal that UK astrophysicists should use their UK Gold OA mandate fund allotment to invest in Arxiv, a central Green OA repository in which they have been depositing, un-mandated, for two decades.

The problem that Open Access (OA) mandates are intended to solve is not in astrophysics: Astrophysicists have been providing OA, without the need of mandates, for almost as long as High Energy Physicists have, by depositing in Arxiv.

But researchers in other disciplines have not followed suit, for over 20 years now.

And they won't, unless OA is mandated.

And the only ones who can monitor and ensure that researchers in all disciplines comply with OA mandates are their institutions.

So astrophysicists would do a much greater service to global OA if they invested in implementing the automatic Arxiv exporter for deposits in their own institutional repositories (IRs).

OA Mandates that would require double-deposit from longstanding Arxiv users -- in both Arxiv and the author's IR -- would be outrageous and out of the question.

But an automatic exporter of IR deposits and their metadata to Arxiv (and any other central repository, such as PubMed Central or EuroCentral) would be a great step toward convergence and interoperability, and would greatly facilitate both the adoption of and compliance with Green OA self-archiving mandates from both funders and institutions.

Of course the extra investment funds are all fantasy, as the UK Gold OA funds are only to be paid to Gold OA journals, not to be spent on whatever the author wishes! But the support of veteran Arxiv users in favour of implementing automatic IR-to-Arxiv export capability would be a great help even without extra money. The functionality is already available, for both EPrints and DSpace IRs:

SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios

Create Export Plugins

Mandate deposit in Institutional Repositories and they will solve the access problem: Reply to M Taylor in LSE

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:02:35 +0000

All quotes are from:
"Institutional repositories have work to do if theyre going to solve the access problem" by Mike Taylor [MT] LSE Impact of Social Sciences 2013

MT: "[Green OA] necessarily creates two classes of papers: authors draft and publishers final versions.

Actually what Green OA does is provide access to the authors draft for those who dont have access to the publishers final version. The difference between night and day for those who have no access at all.

No class differences. Just a remedy for the difference between the Haves and the Have-Nots.

MT: "pagination will differ which means you cant cite page-numbers reliably.

Negligible loss. Cite by section heading and paragraph number. (Page numbers are obsolescent anyway.)

MT: "I have a paper in press now for which a whole additional figure was added at the proofing stage.

Add the figure to your authors draft.

(As Green grows, authors will learn to be more attentive about the needs of the Have-Nots among their potential users in a Green world: Scholarly practice will adapt to the medium, as it always does.)

MT: "[Green OA] creates two classes of researchers those privileged few who have the proper papers and an underclass who have only manuscripts. Gold OA solves this problem Green doesnt.

Gold solves this pseudo-problem at a hefty price, not just in terms of having to double-pay Gold fees out of scarce research funds, over and above existing subscription fees (which already pay for Green), but also in terms of restrictions on authors free choice of journal: a forced choice based on journal economic model instead of journal quality and track-record.

The RCUK Gold-preference mandate also encourages publishers to offer hybrid Gold OA and to extend embargoes on Green OA beyond RCUK limits (to force RCUK authors to pick and pay for Gold), thereby making it gratuitously harder for Have-Not nations (who cannot afford Gold) to mandate and provide Green. Pre-emptive Gold also locks-in journals current revenues and modus operandi and does so even if journals offer a full subscription rebate on all Gold OA revenue.

Mandatory Gold also engenders author resentment and resistance.

In contrast, mandatory Green (if effectively mandated, with compliance verification and as an eligibility condition for research evaluation, as HEFCE has proposed for REF) provides OA for the Have-Nots (about 60% immediate-OA and about 40% Button-mediated Almost-OA for embargoed deposits) at no extra cost, with no constraint on authors free choice of journals.

Again, no class differences. Just a remedy for the difference between the Haves and the Have-Nots.

MT: "Green OA is[n't] cheaper than Gold. the cost to the world of a paywalled paper (aggregated across all subscriptions) is about $5333. no reason to think that will change under the Green model

There is indeed reason. Its through the (hybrid) Gold model -- which RCUK is perversely reinforcing -- that current overall publisher revenues will be locked in (along with double-dipping too, for sure). Even if all Gold payment is given back as a subscription rebate, the total amount paid to publishers remains unchanged.

In contrast, universal Green will force cost-cutting and downsizing by making subscriptions unsustainable:

Harnad, Stevan (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In, Anna, Gacs (ed.) The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. LHarmattan, 99-105. 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 communitys 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.

MT: "By contrast, even the publisher-influenced Finch estimates almost exactly half of what we pay by the subscription model.

What those rosy estimates (based on a fantasy of universal conversion of publishers to pure Gold, under pressure from the RCUK mandate!) overlook is the double-payment that must continue while UK subscriptions remain the only way for UK institutional users to access subscription content.

MT: "the true cost of Gold OA is much, much less half of all Gold OA articles are published at no cost to the author and that the average APC of the other half is about one twelfth of the cost for a paywalled article

Yes indeed, but that cost-free Gold half is unfortunately not the mainstream international journals that are really at issue in all this, for UK authors and users. And its that half that is spuriously lowering the average price of APCs well below what the UK Must-Have journals are charging, especially for hybrid Gold.

Mike, I think you too will eventually come to realize that the only way to attain what we both want which, is not just embargoed Gratis Green, but an end of embargoes, as much Libre OA as users need and researchers want to provide, license reform, publishing reform, and Gold OA at a fair, affordable, sustainable price is by first taking the compromise step of universally mandating immediate deposit of the authors draft in the authors institutional repository, and then letting Nature take its course.

The only thing standing between us and what we all want is keystrokes. Until we mandate those keystrokes, there will be little OA of any sort: Gratis or Libre, Green or Gold, immediate or embargoed.

MT: "there is nothing intrinsic to Green OA that means embargoes must be in place. Its perfectly possible, and manifestly desirable, that no-embargo Green-OA mandates should be enacted, requiring that authors final manuscripts become available immediately on publication. But for whatever historical reasons (and I admit I find this baffling) there are few or no Green-OA mandates that do this. Even the best of them seem to allow a six-month delay; twelve months is not uncommon

Let me unbaffle you then, Mike:

Its pushback from publishers, who then intimidate authors as well as institutional lawyers while also lobbying and intimidating politicians. The result is that no one dares mandate un-embargoed Gratis Green (let alone unembargoed Libre Green), and most authors wouldnt dare provide it even if it were mandated.

(And note that the Harvard-style "rights-retention" mandates not only allow author opt-outs [waivers], which means they are not really mandates at all, but -- as we will shortly be reporting -- they also lead (so far) to exceedingly low deposit rates -- 4% at Harvard and 28.5% at MIT, which is still below the global spontaneous un-mandated baseline self-archiving rate of about 30%, and, paradoxically, amounts to only half of both MIT's and Harvard's own remarkably high self-archiving rate of over 60%: That means only half of the papers that MIT authors self-archive free for all on the Web are deposited in MIT's IR and only 1/15th in the case of Harvard!)

Solution: mandate immediate deposit (no exceptions, no opt-outs, no waivers) and allow (minimal) embargoes on the allowable length of the embargo on access to the deposit. (The "ID/OA mandate.")

That will ensure that the Have-Nots at least gain 60% immediate OA + 40% Almost-OA (Button-mediated).

And then let Nature take its course. Once the keystrokes are being universally done, all you seek, Mike, will not be far behind.

But it will take much longer if we delay (embargo!) the universal adoption of the ID/OA compromise mandate by over-reaching instead for what is not within reach, rather than first grasping what is already fully within reach.

That is called letting the best get in the way of the better. And in advocating that, you are playing into the hands of the publisher lobby, which is also using embargoes (of their own making) along with license restrictions as an excuse for delaying the inevitable transition to OA as long as possible, and making sure it only happens on their terms, preserving their current revenue streams and modus operandi.

MT: "Similarly, there is no intrinsic reason why Green OA should mean non-open licences and Gold OA should mean truly open (BOAI-compliant) open access. And yet history has brought us to a point where is often how things are.

Once again: Grasp first what is within immediate reach and the rest will come. Join Finch instead, in deprecating Green, and you will get next to nothing.

MT: "Many institutions dont even have an IR; or if they do it doesnt work.

Most research-active institutions in the UK (and Europe, and the US and Canada and Australia) already have an IR, but it doesnt work without an (effective) Green OA mandate from funders and institutions.

Any institution is a just piece of free software, some space on a server and some sysad start-up time away from having an IR.

MT: "Many scholars arent associated with an institution and so dont know where they should deposit their manuscripts.

Few researchers are unaffiliated, but for them there is, for example, OpenDepot -- which is still just as empty as IRs for want of mandates...

MT: "The use of IRs involves an institution-by-institution fragmentation, with different user interfaces, policies, etc.

Most IRs are highly interoperable. Mandate Green OA and they will be even more so.

(And distributed local deposit with central harvesting is not fragmentation: its the way of the Web! No one deposits directly in Google. The rest is down to metadata, interoperablity, and harvesting. But theres no incentive to enrich those while the OA content itself is still so impoverished for lack of mandates.)

MT: "For whatever reasons, many scholars do not bother to deposit their manuscripts in institution repositories.

You have just casually mentioned OAs #1 problem for the past 20 years!

But what you forget to say is that even fewer scholars bother to publish in a Gold OA journal.

(With Green deposit [ID/OA], the only deterrent is keystrokes; but with Gold OA theres price and journal-choice restrictions as further deterrents.)

The remedy is of course mandates. But mandates have to be adopted, and complied with. And thats why they have to have all the parameters you are lamenting: Gratis, Green, author draft, embargoed. Thats the immediately reachable path of least resistance for mandate adoption and compliance.

But you have set aside thinking of what youd ideally like to have right away, and think practically about how to get it, not spurning approximations and compromises only to end up with next to nothing.

MT: "Even when mandates are in place, compliance is often miserable, to the point where Peter Suber considers the 80% NIH compliance rate as respectable. It really isnt. 100% is acceptable; 99% is respectable.

There it is again: Reality for the last 20 years has been at 10-40% OA, and you are dismissing as miserable a tried and proven means of generating at least 80%!

I dont wish my 20 miserable years trying to reach OA on anyone, but maybe a dose would not do you any harm, Mike, to help you appreciate the difference between principled armchair wish-lists and practical delivery.

We dont have another decade to waste on ineffectual over-reaching. (And thats whats been holding OA up for the past two decades too.)

(Your questions here are almost all a litany of repetition of the 38+ causes of Zenos Paralysis in this 15-year-old list. I could almost answer them by number!)

MT: "Many IRs have abject search facilities, often for example lacking the ability to restrict searches to papers that are actually available.

No one (except maybe institutional administrators and window-shopping prospective-students or staff) searches at the IR level!

IR metadata (and/or full-texts) are harvested (or imported/exported) at the central harvester/search-engine level (Scirus, BASE, MS Academic Search, Google Scholar) and thats the level at which they are searched.

The central harvester-level search capabilities can be enriched greatly, and they will be, but theres absolutely no point doing that now, with the sparse OA content that there is in IRs (or in any repository) today. Without mandates to provide that content, nuclear-powered search (and text-mining) capabilities would be spinning wheels.

(And in case you imagine that the solution is direct deposit in institution-external repositories: far from it. That just makes the problem of mandating OA worse, forcing authors to deposit willy-nilly in institution-external repositories Arxiv, PMC, EuroPMC, etc. and prevents institutions from being able to monitor compliance with deposit mandates, whether institutional or funder mandates.)

MT: "Many IRs impose unnecessary restrictions on the use of the materials they contain: for example, Baths repo prohibits further redistribution.

Most IRs are sensible (though they all make craven and sometimes excess efforts to comply with publisher copyright conditions and embargoes).

Once Green OA mandates become sufficiently widespread, IRs will get their acts together. For now, the essential thing is to get papers deposited. Once that is being done, globally, everything else we seek will come, and probably surprisingly quickly.

But not if we continue to carp at minor details like Baths overzealousness, as if they were symptoms of ineffectiveness of the Green mandate strategy. They are not. They are simply symptoms of ineffective institutional policy, easily fixed under pressure from other IRs that are doing it right.

MT: "There is no central point for searching all IRs (at least not one that is half-decent; I know about OAIster).

As above: IR metadata (and/or full-texts) are harvested (or imported/exported) at the central harvester/search-engine level (Scirus, BASE, MS Academic Search, Google Scholar) and thats the level at which they are searched.

The central harvester-level search capabilities can be enriched greatly, and they will be, but theres absolutely no point doing that now, with the sparse OA content that there is in IRs (or in any repository) today.

Without effective mandates to fill the IRs, central search is not much more decent than IR-level search: the OA content is simply far too sparse.

MT: "The quality of metadata within most IRs [is] variable at best

Without mandates to provide the content (and motivate the metadata enrichment) rich metadata on impoverished content are no help.

MT: "Use of metadata across IRs is inconsistent — hence many of the problems that render OAIster near-useless.

Scirus, BASE, MS Academic Search, Google Scholar and OAIster are all equally useless without the full-text content. The motivation to enrich and conform the IR metadata will grow with the content, not just as an end in itself.

MT: "Could these issues be addressed? Yes, probably; but ten years have unfortunately not done much to resolve them, so I dont feel all that confident that the next ten will.

There is in reality only one issue: Getting the keystrokes to be mandated (and hence done). Thats whats held us up for 20 years, while we ran off in every direction except the one that would get us to our goal.

It is time to pool efforts toward getting institutions and funders worldwide to adopt the Green OA mandates that will get us there. For that we have to stop focussing on fixing frills that are useless until and unless we first get the content deposited, and stop insisting on organic haute cuisine before we have even taken care of the famine of the Have-Nots.

I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us. [T[here is[n't] any doubt in anyones mind as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library, and its QC/C expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the S/L/P savings. The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posteritys face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!

Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999

Martin Hall's Defence of the UK Finch Committee Recommendations

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 02:09:27 +0000

Comment on:
Martin Hall (2012) "Green or Gold? Open Access After Finch" UKSG Insights 25(3)

This turns out to be a stunningly superficial defence of the Finch Report by one of its authors (and the one from whom one might have hoped for a much fuller grasp of the Green/Gold contingencies, priorities and pragmatics).

The substance of Martin Hall's defence of the Finch recommendation that the UK should (double-)pay for Gold instead of strengthening its mandate for Green is that (1) Gold provides the publisher's version of record, rather than just the author's peer-reviewed final draft, that (2) Gold provides text-mining rights and that (3) Gold is the way to solve the journal price problem.

What Hall does not even consider is whether the publisher's version of record and text-mining rights are worth the asking price of Gold, compared to cost-free Green. His account (like everyone else's) is also astonishingly vague and fuzzy about how the transition to Gold is to take place in the UK. And Hall (like Finch) completely fails to take the rest of the world into account. All the reckoning about the future of publishing is based on the UK's policy for its 6% share.

Hall quotes Peter Suber's objection but does not answer it; and he does not even bother to mention (nor give any sign of being aware of) the substance of my own many, very specific points of criticism about both the Finch recommendations and the RCUK policy. (This is rather consistent, however, since if Hall had given any of these points some serious thought, it is hard to see how he could have endorsed the Finch recommendations in the first place; most had already been made before Finch.)

The Swan/Houghton economic analyses, too, are cited by Hall, as if in support, but in fact not heeded at all.

It will be instructive to see whether the remarkable superficiality of Hall's defence of Finch is noticed by the UK academic community, or it is just catalogued as further "authoritative support" for Finch/RCUK.

Stevan Harnad

RCUK: Don't Follow the Wellcome Trust OA Policy Model!

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:44:08 +0100

Appended after my own overview below is a focused and insightful posting by Fred Friend: As RCUK re-thinks its policy draft, and makes the requisite corrections to ensure that all papers are deposited in an OA repository (Green OA), RCUK should on no account emulate the Wellcome Trust's policy of (1) paying publishers to deposit in the (2) Europe (formerly UK) PubMed Central Repository.

(1) The parties bound by an RCUK OA mandate are RCUK fundees, not publishers. Deposit itself (Green OA) should be a requirement, as a condition of RCUK funding, to be performed by the fundee, not something extra (Gold OA), to be paid extra for, and performed by, a 3rd party, the publisher.

In other words, deposit is self-archiving, by the funded. Moreover, verification of fundee compliance with the RCUK Green OA requirement can and should be focused on the fundee, not on a 3rd party that is not bound to comply with RCUK funding conditions, but simply paid for a product.

The incoherence of the present RCUK OA policy - a direct legacy of the Wellcome policy that RCUK is obviously using as its model -- is, as usual, the result of conflating Gold and Green OA, and putting all the emphasis on Gold OA. This policy definitely has not been an unmitigated success for the Wellcome Trust and is certainly not scalable to all of UK research, for all the reasons Fred mentions below (and many more besides). The Wellcome model should not be imitated by RCUK.

(2) Europe (formerly UK) PubMed Central (EPMC) is an OA collection of European biomedical articles. That's fine. Let there be many such OA subject collections, in many fields, and also global collections, across multiple fields, and across multiple countries. But such collections should on no account be the locus of direct deposit for authors complying with RCUK (or EU or US or individual institutions') self-archiving mandates.

The locus of deposit for complying -- once, and only once -- with either funder or institutional OA mandates should be the author's own institutional OA repository, from which central and global collections can then harvest. This engages institutions in monitoring and ensuring the compliance of their own researchers with both funder and institutional OA self-archiving mandates (Green OA), and it keeps publishers (and publisher payment for Gold OA, a separate matter) out of the loop.

(If an author wishes to pay to publish in a Gold OA journal, and has the funds to do it, that's fine. Then the Gold OA version can be the one the author deposits, rather than just the author's peer-reviewed final draft. But the deposit is in any case done by the author, in the author's institutional repository; and the compliance with the deposit mandate is monitored and verified by the author's institution, whether the mandate is from RCUK or from the institution itself, or both.)

To understand the dynamics, remember that no one deposits anything directly in Google: Google (and Yahoo, etc.) harvest from local websites. That's exactly the way it needs to be for central subject-based or country-based OA collections too, for the sake of compliance-verification by the RCUK fundee's institution and funder and to ensure that authors only ever have to self-archive their papers once: institutional deposit, automatically harvestable by (multiple) central collections (e.g. EPMC).

Stevan Harnad

Admitting that RCUK was "thinking about" mandatory repository deposit, Mr Thorley said that one idea was to expand the Europe (formerly UK) PubMed Central repository, which currently covers only biomedicine, to encompass all subjects to help publishers automate deposits. [Mark Thorley of RCUK quoted in an article by Paul Jump in Times Higher Education of 4 October 2012.\

Fred Friend (posted on JISC-REPOSITORIES):

I wonder whose idea this was! I can make one or two guesses, but whoever suggested it, it is a bad idea! I welcomed the development of UK PubMed Central, until the point when Wellcome Trust started to pay some publishers to make the deposit on behalf of authors and funders. I do not know whether Wellcome will disclose the sums paid to publishers, but my impression is that whatever is being paid more than covers the cost of making the deposit and is in effect a payment to publishers for open access and re-use rights. When people I know who are not in academia ask me about my work and I explain that I am working for open access to taxpayer-funded research, this is welcomed by whoever I am speaking to until I say that many publishers are asking to be paid by taxpayers for making articles open access, at which point the welcome from my listener turns to incredulity. Even more incredulity if I mention the level of payments being requested for APCs. So, if RCUK were to go down the road of paying publishers to deposit in Europe PubMed Central, they should be prepared for challenges on such a mis-use of public money, especially if the deposit payment were to be in addition to the payment of an APC. Presumably the existing funders of UKPMC some of them charities would also expect a contribution from the non-biomedical RCs towards the high cost of running Europe PMC. This idea could cost a lot of money.

I suspect that there will also be objections from subject groups who see their repository needs as being very different from those of the biomedical community. How many times in my long career have I heard that other such all-embracing proposals will not work for subject x or y! UKPMC is a wonderful service for the biomedical community, a service for which they are prepared to pay and have the resources to pay, but its design will not fit all subjects without major modification. Already I hear some concern about the undue influence of the biomedical community and Wellcome in particular upon the Finch Report and thus upon Government policy. The suspicion is that the open access policy of the Wellcome Trust, which works very well for the Trust and for the biomedical community, is being adopted for all UK research outputs without consideration of the way the Trusts open access decisions can be applied within other very different academic structures.

RCUK: please think again! It is good that you are considering mandatory repository deposit, but there are other repositories which can provide better value for the service you need.

Fred Friend

Finch Fiasco in Figures

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:15:00 +0100

The Finch Report, under strong and palpable influence from the publishing lobby, instead of recommending extending and optimizing the UK's worldwide lead in providing Green OA, cost-free, through institutional and funder self-archiving mandates, has recommended abandoning Green OA and Green OA mandates and instead spending extra money (£50-60 million yearly) on paying publishers' Gold OA fees as well as a UK blanket national site-license fee to cover whatever is not yet Gold OA (i.e., all the journals that UK institutions currently subscribe to, rather like the "Big Deals" publishers have been successfully negotiating with individual institutions and consortia):

Finch on Green: "The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories [so] the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should [instead] be developed [to] play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation [no mention of Green OA]"

Finch on Gold: "Gold" open access, funded by article charges, should be seen as "the main vehicle for the publication of research" Public funders should establish "more effective and flexible arrangements" to pay [Gold OA] article charges During the transition to [Gold] open access, funding should be found to extend licences [subscriptions] for non-open-access content to the whole UK higher education and health sectors

Now here are some of the actual figures behind the above assertions. Let readers come to their own conclusions about the relative success, cost, benefits, cost-effectiveness, growth potential and timetable of mandating Green OA vs funding Gold OA:

1. Mandated vs. Unmandated Green OA (20% vs 70%+):

2. Rise of Green Mandates:

3. Rise of Green OA, 2009-2011:

4. Rise of Gold OA 2003-2011 (from Nature, 2012)
(N.B.: Re-scaled at right for accurate comparison with rise of Green, above):

5. Projected rise of Gold OA (70% in 2020 or 2026; 100% in 2022 or 2029):

6. Relative Green and Gold OA Worldwide in 2010

7. Relative Green and Gold OA in United Kingdom in 2010 (from Nature, 2012)

8. The OA Citation Impact Advantage: (OA vs. non-OA)

9. The OA Economic Advantage for the United Kingdom:

Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLoS ONE 5(6): e11273.

Finch, Dame Janet et al (2012) Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5 (10) e13636

Gargouri, Yassine; Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Stevan Harnad (2012) Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. In, 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age L'Harmattan. 99-106.

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).

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59.

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community 21(3-4): 86-93

Hitchcock, Steve (2012) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.

Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

Houghton, John, Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2011) Access to research and technical information in Denmark. Report to The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (FI) and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF)

Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, et al. (2011) The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

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

ROAR Registry of Open Access Repositories

ROARMAP Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies

Van Noorden, Richard (2012) Britain aims for broad open access. Nature News 19 January 2012.

How Elsevier Can Improve Its Public Image

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:07:53 +0100

Elsevier Authors' Rights & Responsibilities

What rights do I retain as a journal author?
"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specificagreement with the publisher)..."

Along with the majority of refereed journal publishers today, Elsevier is a "Green" publisher, meaning Elsevier has formally endorsed immediate (unembargoed) institutional Green OA self-archiving by its authors ever since 27 May 2004.

Recently, however, a new clause has been added to "Authors' Rights and Responsibilities," the document in which Elsevier formally recognizes its authors' right to make their final, peer-reviewed drafts Open Access immediately upon publication (no embargo) by posting them on their institutional website (Green Gratis OA). The new clause is:

"but not in institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings."

The distinction between an institutional website and an institutional repository is bogus.

The distinction between nonmandatory posting (allowed) and mandatory posting (not allowed) is arbitrary nonsense. ("You retain the right to post if you wish but not if you must!")

The "systematic" criterion is also nonsense. (Systematic posting would be the institutional posting of all the articles in the journal; but any single institution only contributes a tiny, arbitrary fraction of the articles in any journal, just as any single author does; so the mandating institution is not a 3rd-party "free-rider" on the journal's content: its researchers are simply making their own articles OA, by posting them on their institutional website, exactly as described.)

This "systematic" clause is hence pure FUD, designed to scare or bully or confuse institutions into not mandating posting, and to scare or bully or confuse authors into not complying with their institutional mandates. (There are also rumours that in confidential licensing negotiations with institutions, Elsevier has been trying to link bigger and better pricing deals to the institution's agreeing not to adopt a Green OA mandate.)

Elsevier's public image is so bad today that rescinding its Green light to self-archive after almost a decade of mounting demand for OA is hardly a very attractive or viable option.

And double-talk, smoke-screens and FUD are even less attractive or viable.

It will hence very helpful in helping researchers to provide -- and their institutions and funders to mandate -- Open Access if Elsevier drops its "you may if you wish but not if you must" clause.

It will also help to improve Elsevier's public image.

Stevan Harnad

Self-Archive Institutionally, Harvest Centrally

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:39:18 +0100

Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

In the Hedda Blog, Chris Maloney (Contractor for PubMed Central) asked:

"Assuming the article is in the biomedical field, can authors simultaneously put a copy of their manuscript in their institutions repository, and upload it to PMC through the NIHMS? Or does the article have to be funded by the NIH for them to do this? The reason I ask question #2 is that I am wondering if just putting a manuscript [in]to an IR is enough to truly make the article visible and accessible. Just because somethings on the web doesnt mean it will be found. Just because somethings indexed by Google doesnt mean it will have high rank in their search results. Putting a manuscript on PMC, through NIHMS or other channels, means that it would be indexed in PubMed, which would make it more accessible."

This an extremely important practical issue, and at the moment it is not being properly implemented.

The short answer is, yes, a document deposited in the author's institutional repository (IR) can be uploaded to PMC through NIHMS, regardless of whether NIH has funded the research (and, a fortiori, regardless of whether NIH has funded extra "gold" OA publication fees).

But those extra author self-archiving steps should not be necessary! The reason it became apparent that green OA self-archiving mandates (from both institutions and funders) would be necessary was that spontaneous, unmandated self-archiving rates remain low (about 20%), even when recommended or encouraged by institutions and funders. That's why the first NIH OA policy, a request, failed until it was upgraded to a requirement.

But the practical implementation of the NIH mandate was still short-sighted: It required direct deposit in PMC, and allowed this to be done by either the author or the publisher. The result was not only (1) uncertainty about who needed to deposit what, when, not only (2) a partial reliance on a 3rd party other than the fundee, not bound by the grant, namely, the publisher, to fulfill the conditions of a grant to the fundee, but it also (3) imposed a double burden on fundees if their own institutions were to mandate self-archiving too: They had to deposit in their own IRs and also in PMC.

This did not help either with encouraging more institutions to adopt self-archiving mandates (even though institutions are the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines) nor with encouraging authors, already sluggish about self-archiving at all, to comply with self-archiving mandates (since they might be faced with having to deposit the same paper many times).

Yet in reality, the problem is merely a formal one, not a technical one. Software (e.g., SWORD) can import and export the contents of one repository to another automatically. More important: There is no need for institutional authors ever to have to self-archive directly in an institution-external (central) repository like PMC: The contents of IRs are all OAI-compliant and harvestable automatically by whatever central repositories might want them.

So institutional and funder mandates need to be collaborative and convergent, not competitive and divergent, as some (including NIH's) are now. And the convergence needs to be on institution-internal deposit, followed by central harvesting (e.g. to PMC) where desired -- certainly not the reverse.

"Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally." This not only encourages institutions to adopt their own mandates, to complement funder mandates and cover the entire OA target corpus, but it also puts institutions in a position to monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates. (Ensuring that all funder grant fulfillment conditions are met is something that institutions are always very eager to do!)

(The visibility/accessibility worry is, I think, a red herring: OAI-compliant institutional repositories are harvested by Google, Google Scholar, BASE. citeseerx and many other search engines, including OAI-specific ones. And besides, IR metadata and documents can also be harvested into central repositories like PMC and UK-PMC. The only real factor in visibility and accessibility is whether or not an article has been made green OA at all! Where it is made OA matters little, and it matters less and less as more and more is made OA.)

See:

"How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"
Summary: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
      Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.
      Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
      As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

Arxiv's Funding Pains May Be A Wake-Up Call: Distributed Versus Central Archiving

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:16:21 +0100

Comments on:
Ginsparg, Paul (2011) Arxiv at 20. Nature 476: 145147 doi:10.1038/476145a

&

Fischman, Josh (2011) Anonymous FTP Achives. The First Free Research-Sharing Site, arXiv, Turns 20 With an Uncertain Future. Chronicle of Higher Education August 10, 2011

Anonymous FTP archives. Arxiv (1991) was an invaluable milestone on the road to Open Access. But it was not the first free research-sharing site: That began in the 1970's with the internet itself, with authors making their papers freely accessible to all users net-wide by self-archiving them in their own local institutional "anonymous FTP archives."

Distributed local websites. With the creation of the world wide web in 1990, HTTP began replacing FTP sites for the self-archiving of papers on authors' institutional websites. FTP and HTTP sites were mostly local and distributed, but accessible free for all, webwide. Arxiv was the first important central HTTP site for research self-archiving, with physicists webwide all depositing their papers in one central locus (first hosted at Los Alamos). Arxiv's remarkable growth and success were due to both its timeliness and the fact that it had emerged from a widespread practice among high energy physicists that had already predated the web, namely, to share hard copies of their papers before publication by mailing them to central preprint distribution sites such as SLAC and CERN.

Central harvesting and search. At the same time, while physicists were taking to central self-archiving, in other disciplines (particularly computer science), distributed self-archiving continued to grow. Later web developments, notably google and webwide harvesting and search engines, continued to make distributed self-archiving more and more powerful and attractive. Meanwhile, under the stimulus of Arxiv itself, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created in 1999 -- a metadata-harvesting protocol that made all distributed OAI-compliant websites interoperable, as if their distributed local contents were all in one global, searchable archive.

No need for direct central deposit in google! Together, google and OAI probably marked the end of the need for central archives. The cost and effort can instead be distributed across institutions, with all the essential search and retrieval functionality provided by automated central "overlay" services for harvesting, indexing, search and retrieval (e.g., OAIster, Scirus, Base and Google Scholar). Arxiv continues to flourish, because two decades of invaluable service to the physics community has several generations of users deeply committed to it. But no other dedicated central archive has arisen since. Like computer scientists, whose local, distributed self-archiving is harvested centrally by Citeseerx, economists, for example, self-archive institutionally, with central harvesting by RepEc.

Mandating self-archiving. In biomedicine, PubMed Central looks to be an exception, with direct central depositing rather than local. But PubMed Central was not a direct author initiative, like anonymous FTP, author websites or Arxiv. It was designed by NLM, deposit was mandated by NIH, and deposit is done not only by authors but by publishers.

Institutions are the universal research providers. Open Access is still growing far more slowly than it might, and one of the factors holding it back might be notional conflicts between institutional and central archiving. It is clear that Open Access self-archiving will have to be universally mandated, if all disciplines are to enjoy its benefits (maximized research access, uptake, usage and impact, minimized costs). The universal providers of all research paper output, funded and unfunded, are the world's universities and research institutions, distributed globally across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, all languages, and all national boundaries.

Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally. Hence funder self-archiving mandates like NIH's and institutional self-archiving mandates like Harvard's need to join forces to reinforce one another rather than to complete for the same papers, and the most natural, efficient and economical way to do this is for both institutiions and funders to mandate that all self-archivingshould be done locally, in the author's institutional OAI-compliant repository. The contents of the institutional repositories can then be harvested automatically by central OAI-compliant repositories such as PubMed Central (as well as by google and other central harvesters) for global indexing and search.

Distribute the archiving, rather than the cost. In this light, Arxiv's self-funding pains may be a wake-up call: Why should Cornell University (or a "wealthy donor") subsidize a cost that institutions can best "sponsor" by each doing (and mandating) their own distributed archiving locally (thereby reducing total cost, to boot)? After all, no one deposits directly in Google

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

"How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"

SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
      Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.
      Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
      As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

Cornell, Arxiv and Institutional vs. Central Repositories

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:24:39 +0100

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Joseph Esposito wrote (in liblicense):

JE:
What is the current uptake on arXiv for physics articles? Is it 100%, that is, are there any articles in the field that are published in traditional physics journals that do not appear in arXiv?

It varies by field. In HEP and Astro, most published journal articles are also self-archived in Arxiv.

To understand the meaning of this, however, it is important to note that extremely few papers that are self-archived in Arxiv are not (eventually) published in journals: Arxiv is an access-provider -- to published and pre-publication research papers. Arxiv is not a publisher: Arxiv neither peer-reviews its contents, nor does it certify that they have been peer-reviewed; the publisher does that.

Hence, like all open access repositories, Arxiv is a supplement to publication, not a substitute for it.

JE:
Considering the centrality of arXiv to the physics community, it is difficult to imagine that it would ever disappear (or that anyone would want it to).

No one wants Arxiv to disappear, but I'll bet that within a decade or sooner Arxiv will just be another automated central harvester of distributed local deposits from authors' own institutional repositories (IRs), not a central locus of direct, institution-external deposit. In the age of IRs, it is no longer necessary -- nor does it make sense -- for authors to self-archive institution-externally. It is also a needless central expense to manage deposit centrally. It makes much more sense to deposit institutionally and harvest centrally.

JE:
My understanding is that arXiv is funded by a combination of support from Cornell, a large government grant, and contributions from other research universities. If this funding were to disappear (I heard it was threatened a year or two ago), would arXiv be resurrected by the community?

Once all universities have IRs and IR self-archiving mandates, there will be no need to fund repositories for institution-external deposit. Harvesting is cheap. And each university's IR will be a standard part of its online infrastructure.

JE:
Finally, once again taking the centrality of arXiv to the community it serves into consideration, what would happen if a modest deposit fee were assessed--say, $50 per article?

The IR cost per paper deposited will be closer to 50c than $50, once all universities are hosting their own output, and mandating that it be deposited.

JE:
I am not suggesting that this should or should not happen; I am simply wondering what the outcome would be. (BioMed Central, PLoS, and Hindawi all charge more than this, though they provide additional services.) Would the number of deposits remain about the same? Would the number drop? And if it dropped, how precipitously?

Guess again! Once the burden of hosting, access-provision and archiving is offloaded onto each author's institution, the only service that journals will need to provide is peer review, and hence journals will be charging institutions a lot less than they are charging now. (Print editions as well as online editions and their costs will be gone too.)

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 12:57 AM, Simeon Warner wrote (in jisc-repositories):

SH:
The IR cost per paper deposited will be closer to 50c than $50, once all universities are hosting their own output, and mandating that it be deposited.
SW:
I do not think the 50c number is supported by fact or by trend. I know that for Cornell's IR the number is much closer to $50 than to 50c if one divides cost to operate by the number of new submissions in the same period. (I would love to see data for other IRs.)

Simeon, I can only repeat the premise under which that prediction is made:

"once all universities are hosting their own output, and mandating that it be deposited."
Cornell has not mandated deposit, and it is far from hosting all of its annual output. Ditto for all but about 100 universities so far worldwide.

(Not to mention that Cornell and many other universities may not have picked the optimal free IR software solution either ;>) ...)

SW:
For arXiv the number is <$7. We have the benefit of significant scale (65k submissions/year) and a user community that require very little hand-holding.

Yes, you have significant scale. But, for Arxiv, it is Cornell, a federal grant, plus funds from some universities that are paying for all the deposits, from all universities, in that one central repository.

To repeat: The sensible solution (and probably the only practical, affordable, sustainable one) is for Arxiv -- and any other central archives like it in other fields -- to harvest their respective content automatically from Institutional Repositories that host their own research output. (Institutions, after all, are the universal providers of all that content.)

The annual cost per paper deposited will be far less for an Institutional Repository -- hosting only its own research output -- once the institutions are indeed hosting all of their own annual research output -- and not just a small fragment of it, as now.

Most institutions today have IRs that are still near-empty rather than at full capacity (as far as OA's target content is concerned). (The cost/benefit of universities hosting their own grey literature output and other kinds of content they generate is another matter, but not to be reckoned into this comparison with Arxiv regarding per-article cost. IRs can archive lots of kinds of things, including departmental reports or family photo albums, if desired...)

And Cornell, of course, has the double burden of hosting a near-empty, unmandated IR for its own refereed research output, plus the (partial) expense of hosting Arxiv for the rest of the world!

See:

Annual Costs Per Deposit of Hosting Refereed Research Output Centrally Versus Institutionally

Why Cornell's Institutional Repository Is Near-Empty

More: http://bit.ly/MoreOnCornellPolicy

SW:
This is not to say that IRs aren't worth the support from their local institution! Compared with the cost of doing research resulting in an article, $50 is pocket change. I think that a key driver for IRs is that they align well funding with mission. At Cornell we consider it a worthwhile service for our faculty to provide considerably more support for the IR than arXiv could provide its users.

There are many valid reasons for institutions creating and supporting their IRs -- but only if they mandate that they be filled with their target content.

Among those many valid reasons are economic ones:

ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et als (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (Open Access, OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the worlds peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et als modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research.

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1). pp. 55-59.

SW:
(As a side note I mention that at arXiv we consider free access and free submission to be foundational and thus did not consider an author-pays model. See http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper for more details of our business planning process.)

Arxiv is a repository for articles that have been or will be refereed and published by journals. There is an "author pays" model for paying for that refereeing and publishing through author/institution publication fees (for OA journals, and a subscription model for non-OA journals, which are still the vast majority). -- But there is not, never was, and never need be an "author pays" model merely to pay for the deposit of the author's draft of those same articles.

Arxiv is a repository, providing access, not a publisher of refereed research. It is the many different journals in which Arxiv's depositors publish who are still the ones doing the refereeing and the publishing (i.e., implementing the peer review process and certifying the outcome, if successful, as having met that journal's established quality standards). And journals need to recover the costs of providing that essential service, either via journal subscriptions tolls or via "author pays" (i.e., article publication fees)

SH:
Once the burden of hosting, access-provision and archiving is offloaded onto each author's institution, the only service that journals will need to provide is peer review, and hence journals will be charging institutions a lot less than they are charging now. (Print editions as well as online editions and their costs will be gone too.)
SW:
Overlay journals are also very interesting and I hope will grow in number. This does not seem to be happening yet though. A trend we see right now is a rather problematic increase in the number of low quality author-pays website-and-little-else online journals. They aggressively promote their articles through open-access services such as arXiv while established journals wrestle with the transition.

On this you are entirely right, Simeon (though I think the term "overlay journals" is a misdescription of what may eventually come to pass, once all refereed, published articles are being self-archived in their author's IR).

(And Cornell is aiding and abetting the very trend you mention, by agreeing pre-emptively to subsidize "author pays" costs for (some of) Cornell authors' articles while failing to mandate self-archiving of all of Cornell authors' articles, cost-free!)

See: http://bit.ly/PreemptiveCOPEandSCOAP3

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

SW:
In all of this the tools necessary to use IR content effectively still lag well behind the facilities offered by subject repositories.

Many of the necessary tools are not needed at the individual IR level, because search takes place at the harvester level.

What IRs lack is not tools, but content. Once we have the OA's target content (refereed journal articles), developing the tools is a piece of cake.

SW:
One should also not underestimate the cost of building effective collections over harvested data (see, for example, the NSDL experience)

We can cross that bridge when we get to it -- if Google Scholar does not cross it for us -- once the target content is indeed being deposited in the IRs, globally -- because deposit has been universally mandated at long last.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Estimating Japan's Annual Rate of Journal Article Self-Archiving

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:40:16 +0100

Note added 17 September: Many thanks to Hideki Uchijima, Librarian of the Kanazawa University Library, for providing a very comprehensive and conscientious response.
    The response provides more accurate estimates of the percentage (11.1%) of Japanese annual refereed research article output that is currently being self-archived in the 158 Japanese Institutional Repositories that are being harvested by JAIRO, basing the estimate on the ISI Thompson-Reuters subset, an excellent first approximation (which we and others have also used to do such estimates), and confirming that Japan's unmandated self-archiving rate indeed falls within the global average baseline of 5-25%.
    Hideki Uchijima also adds the good news that Hokkaido University (already registered in ROARMAP in 2008 as having an OA policy, but not yet an OA mandate) might soon be upgrading to a self-archiving mandate (and this might encourage further universities in Japan to do likewise).
    And last, Hideki Uchijima will now also try to persuade the IR managers of the remaining 81 Japanese universities (out of the 158 JAIRO total) who (unlike Hokkaido University and 76 other Japanese universities) have not yet done so, to register their IRs in ROAR.
    If all librarians, IR managers and OA activists worldwide were as attentive and responsive as Kanazawa University's librarian, the world would reach its goal of 100% OA far sooner. (Many are, but far, far more need to be!)
Note added 18 September: Andrew A Adams (Meiji University) wrote:
    "During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan..."

Congratulations to Japan's JAIRO for harvesting the 700,000 full-texts (out of one million total) self-archived in Japan's 158 Institutional Repositories since 2007.

To understand what this figure means, however, the fundamental question is whether or not it represents an increase over the worldwide baseline average for spontaneous (i.e. unmandated) self-archiving, which varies between 5-25% of the total annual output of the primary target content of the Open Access movement: the 2.5 million articles per year published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals across all disciplines and languages.

Of JAIRO's 700K full-text total, about 110K (15.5%) consisted of journal articles, based on JAIRO's statistical data.

From the growth chart (if I have interpreted it correctly), about 75% of 50,000 articles (i.e., 35,000 full-texts) were deposited in 2009. If we can assume that those deposits were all articles published within that same year (or the preceding one), then the question is: What percentage of Japan's (or of those 158 institutions') annual portion of the 2.5 million articles published yearly worldwide do these 35,000 full-texts represent? Does it exceed the worldwide unmandated baseline of 5-25%?

The reason I raise this question is because absolute figures -- even absolute growth rates across years -- are not meaningful in themselves. They are only meaningful if expressed as the percentage of total annual output. For a single institutional repository, this means the percentage of that institution's annual output of refereed journal articles. For Japan's 158 institutional repositories, it means the percentage of the total annual output of those 158 institutions.

On the conservative assumption that research-active universities publish at least 1000 refereed journal articles per year, the estimate would be that those 35K articles represent at most about 22% of those institutions' annual refereed journal article output, which falls within the global 5-25% unmandated baseline.

The reason I stress this point is that it is important that we do not content ourselves with absolute self-archiving totals and growth rates that look sizeable considered in isolation. The figure to beat is the unmandated baseline of 5-25%, and the only institutions that consistently beat it are those that mandate self-archiving. Their deposit rates jump to 60% and approach 100% within a few years.

There are already 170 self-archiving mandates worldwide registered in ROARMAP -- 96 institutional, 24 departmental and 46 funder mandates -- but alas none yet from Japan. If there are any, it would be very helpful if they would be registered in ROARMAP.

Also, although Japan has at least 158 repositories, only 77 of them are registered in ROAR:

It would be very helpful if the rest were registered in ROAR too...

References
Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLOS ONE 5(6): e11273.

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE (in press)

Harnad, S, (2008) Estimating Annual Growth in OA Repository Content. Open Access Archivangelism. August 9 2008

Sale, Arthur (2006) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Sale, A. (2006) The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4).

Sale, A. (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.

Sale, A. (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.

Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Testing Jan Velterop's Hunch About Green and Gold Open Access

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:36:12 +0100

Mandated and Unmandated Open Access:
Comparing Green and Gold

Yassine Gargouri
&
Stevan Harnad

Cognition/Communication Laboratory
Cognitive Sciences Institute
Universitè du Québec à Montréal

SUMMARY: Velterop (2010) has conjectured that more articles are being made Open Access (OA) by publishing them in an OA journal ("Gold OA") than by publishing them in a conventional journal and self-archiving them ("Green OA"), even where self-archiving is mandatory. Of our sample of 11,801 articles published 2002-2008 by authors at four institutions that mandate self-archiving, 65.6% were self-archived, as required (63.2% Green only, 2.4% both Green and Gold). For 42,395 keyword-matched, non-mandated control articles, the percentage OA was 21.9% Green and 1.5% Gold. Velterops conjecture is the wrongest of all precisely where OA is mandated.

Jan Velterop has posted his hunch that of the overall percentage of articles published annually today most will prove to be Gold OA journal articles, once one separates from the articles that are classified as self-archived Green OA those of them that also happen to be published in Gold OA journals:

    JV: Is anyone aware of credible research that shows how many articles (in the last 5 years, say), outside physics and the Arxiv preprint servers, have been made available with OA exclusively via 'green' archiving in repositories, and how many were made available with OA directly ('gold') by the publishers (author-side paid or not)?
    The 'gold' OA ones may of course also be available in repositories, but shouldn't be counted for this purpose, as their OA status is not due to them being 'green' OA.
   It is my hunch (to be verified or falsified) that publishers (the 'gold' road) have actually done more to bring OA about than repositories, even where mandated (the 'green' road).
-- J. Velterop, American Scientist Open Access Forum, 25 August 2010

The results turn out to go strongly contrary to Velterops hunch.

Our ongoing project is comparing citation counts for mandated Green OA articles with those for non-mandated Green OA articles, all published in journals indexed by the Thompson/Reuters ISI database (science and social-science/humanities). (We use only the ISI-indexed sample because the citation counts for our comparisons between OA and non-OA are all derived from ISI.)

The four mandated institutions were Southampton University (ECS), Minho, Queensland University of Technology and CERN.

Out of our total set of 11,801 mandated, self-archived OA articles, we first set aside all those (279) articles that had been published in Gold OA journals (i.e., the journals in the DOAJ-indexed subset of ISI-indexed journals) because we were primarily interested in testing the OA citation advantage, which is based on comparing the citation counts of OA articles versus non-OA articles published in the same journal and year. (This can only be done in non-OA journals, because OA journals have no non-OA articles.) This left only the Green OA articles published in non-Gold journals.

We then extracted, as control articles for each article in this purely Green OA subset, 10 keyword-matched articles published in the same journal and year. The total number of articles in this control sample for the years 2002-2008 was 41,755. (Our preprint for PloS, Gargouri et al. 2010, covers a somewhat smaller, earlier period: 2002-2006, with 20,982 control articles.)

Next we used a robot to check what percentage of these unmandated control articles was OA (freely accessible on the web).

Of our total set of 11,801 mandated, self-archived articles, 279 articles (2.4%) had been published in the 63 Gold OA journals (2.6%) among the 2,391 ISI-indexed journals in which the authors from our four mandated institutions had published in 2002-2008. Both these estimates of percent Gold OA are about half as big as the total 5% proportion for Gold OA journals among all ISI-indexed journals (active in the past 10 years). To be conservative, we can use the higher figure of 5% as a first estimate of the Gold OA contribution to total OA among all ISI-indexed journals.

Now, in our sample, we find that out of the total number of articles published in ISI-indexed journals by authors from our four mandated institutions between 2002-2008 (11,801 articles), about 65.6% of them (7,736 articles) had indeed been made Green OA through self-archiving by their authors, as mandated (7,457 or 63.2% Green only, and 279 or 2.4% both Green and Gold).

In contrast, for our 42,395 keyword-matched, non-mandated control articles, the percentage OA was 23.4% (21.9% Green and 1.5% Gold).

Björk et als (2010) corresponding finding [Table 3] for their ISI sample (1282 articles for 2008 alone, calculated in 2009), was 20.6% total OA (14% Green plus 6.6% Gold). (For an extended sample that also included non-ISI journals it was 11.9% Green plus 8.5% Gold.)

The variance is probably due to different discipline blends in the samples (see Björk et al's Figure 4, where Gold exceeds Green in bio-medicine), but whichever overall results one chooses whether our 21.9% Green and 1.5% Gold or Björk et als 14% Gold and 6.6% Green (or even their extended 11.9% Green and 8.5% Gold), the figures fail to bear out Velterops hunch that:

publishers (the 'gold' road) have actually done more to bring OA about than repositories, even where mandated (the 'green' road).

Moreover (and this is really the most important point of all), Velterop's hunch is the wrongest of all precisely where OA is mandated, for there the percent Green is over 60%, and headed toward 100%. That is the real power of Green OA mandates.

References
Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 10(5)

Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLOS ONE 5(6): e11273.

Authors' Drafts, Publishers' Versions-of-Record, Digital Preservation, Open Access and Institutional Repositories

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:14:32 +0100

Commentary on Richard Poynder's
"Preserving the Scholarly Record:
Interview with digital preservation specialist Neil Beagrie"

The trouble with universities (or nations) treating digital preservation (which is a genuine problem, and a genuine responsibility) as a single generic problem -- covering all the university's (or nation's) "digital output," whether published or unpublished, OA or non-OA -- is not only that adding an additional preservation cost and burden where it is not yet needed (by conflating Green OA self-archiving mandates with "preservation mandates" and their funding demands) makes it even harder to get a Green OA self-archiving mandate adopted at all. But taking an indiscriminate, scattershot approach to the preservation problem also disserves the digital preservation agenda itself.

As usual, what is needed is to sort out and understand the actual contingencies, and then to implement the priorities, clearly and explicitly, in the requisite causal order. The priorities here are to focus university (or national) preservation efforts and funds on what needs to be preserved today. And -- as far as universities' own institutional repositories (IRs) are concerned -- that does not include the publisher's official version-of-record for that university's (or nation's) journal article output. Preserving those versions-of-record is a matter to be worked out among deposit libraries and the publishers and institutional subscribers of the journals in question. Each university's own IR is for providing OA to its own authors' final, refereed drafts of those articles, in order to make them accessible to those users worldwide who do not have subscription access to the version-of-record. The author's draft does indeed need preservation too, but that's not the same preservation problem as the problem of preserving the published version-of-record (nor is it the same document!).

Perhaps one day universal Green OA mandates will cause journal subscriptions to become unsustainable, because the worldwide users of journal articles will be fully satisfied with just the author's final drafts rather than needing the publisher's version-of-record, and hence journal subscriptions will be cancelled. If and when we ever reach that point, the version-of-record will no longer be produced by the publisher, because the authors' drafts will effectively become the version-of-record. Journal publishers will then convert to Gold OA publishing, with what remains of the cost of publication paid for by institutions, per individual article published, out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings. (Some of those savings can then also be devoted to digital preservation of the institutional version-of-record.)

But conflating the (nonexistent) need to pay for this hypothetical future contingency today (when we still have next to no OA or OA mandates, and subscriptions are still going strong) with either universities' (or nations') digital preservation agenda or their OA IR agenda is not only incoherent but counterproductive.

Let's keep the agendas distinct: IRs can archive many different kinds of content. Let's work to preserve all IR content, of course, but let's not mistake that IR preservation function for journal article preservation or OA.

For journal articles, worry about preserving the version-of-record -- and that has nothing to do with what is being deposited in IRs today.

For OA, worry about mandating deposit of the author's version -- and that has nothing to do with digital preservation of the version-of-record.

Nor should the need to mandate depositing the author's version be in any way hamstrung with extra expenses that concern the publish's version-of-record, or the university's IR, or OA. (Exactly the same thing is true, mutatis mutandis, at the national preservation level, insofar as journal articles are concerned: A journal's contents do not all come from one institution, nor from one nation.)

And, while we're at it, let's also keep university (or national) funding of Gold OA publishing costs distinct from the Green OA mandating agenda too. First things first. Needlessly over-reaching (for Gold OA funds or preservation funds) simply delays getting what is already fully within universities' (and nations') grasps -- which is the newfound (but mostly unused) potential to provide OA to the authors' drafts of all their refereed journal articles by requiring them to be deposited in their OA IRs (not by reforming journal publishing, nor by solving the digital preservation problem).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Mandate of Open Access Institutional Repository Managers

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:05:00 +0100

SUMMARY: Open Access (OA) Institutional Repository (IR) managers need to remind themselves that their mandate is to see to it that their IRs are filled with OA's target content (peer-reviewed research journal articles) so as to maximize the accessibility, visibility, usage and impact of their institution's research output. Their mandate is not to seek or provide alternative "business models" for journal publishing.

In a UKSG Serials News posting,

"Are we nearly there yet? On the road to open access",

Graham Stone [GS], Repository Manager, University of Huddersfield and Chair, UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) wrote:

GS: "Not too long ago, I took a phone call from an academic colleague from the Health Sciences regarding the submission of an article to Biomed Central. [The colleague] phoned me as I am the 'Repository guy' and [the colleague was] learning to play the 'Repository game', that is getting their work out there on open access and increasing their citations. [The colleague was] very impressed that so many people downloaded their last paper within days of it appearing in the Repository."

This upbeat-sounding paragraph is unfortunately a series of (familiar) misunderstandings and non-sequiturs about Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IRs):

(1) Biomed Central (BMC) is a gold OA (pay-to-publish) journal publisher.

(2) Publishing in a BMC journal has nothing to do with depositing an article in "the Repository."

Which Repository -- Huddersfield's? You don't need to publish in a pay-to-publish gold OA journal in order to deposit in a green OA Institutional Repository (IR) like Huddersfield's, nor in order to benefit from the increased downloads and citations that OA makes possible. All you do is publish in whatever journal you publish in, and deposit the final refereed draft in your OA IR as soon as it is accepted for publication.

Or was the deposit in PubMed Central (PMC, not BMC)? Likewise no payment required (but what does deposit in that institution-external repository have to do with U. Huddersfield's IR, or its IR manager?).

(3) There is no "Repository game". There is just the research and publication game.

(Providing OA maximizes research access, usage and impact, and OA can be provided in two ways. I. "Gold OA": by publishing in an OA journal (of which the major ones require payment to publish); or II. "Green OA": by publishing in any journal at all -- whether subscription-based or OA -- and also depositing the final draft in your OA IR: no payment required. The "game" is merely ensuring that all potential users have online access to your published articles, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happened to be published.)

GS: "It struck me as very interesting that to [this colleague], the next stage of the 'game' was to consider switching from green to gold open access - providing someone would pay of course!"

The colleague sounds like a researcher who has just deposited an article for the first time in an OA repository (perhaps PMC, though it should have been Huddersfield's IR), and not a researcher who has just paid BMC for gold OA publication (otherwise the colleague would know who was paying!).

Something has definitely been garbled here...

GS: "This is not the first time that this topic has come up in conversation in the past few weeks. At the recent LIBER conference at Aarhus University in Denmark discussion over dinner turned to open access. One comment from a colleague was that green open access could not be successful in the long run as this was a compromise, and 'compromises never work'."

How is providing OA to one's published article by depositing it in one's IR a "compromise"?

A compromise of what, with what, for whom?

Depositing an article in an IR consists of a few minutes' worth of keystrokes that maximize the access, usage and impact of one's article.

But perhaps the LIBER discussion was not among (1) researchers, discussing the problem of how to "get their work out there on open access and increase their citations" rather than continue to allow access to it to be restricted only to those researchers whose institutions can afford to pay for subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published...

Perhaps the LIBER discussion was instead among (2) librarians, discussing the problem of how to afford to pay for subscription access?

Or perhaps the LIBER discussion was among (3) publishers, discussing the problem of how to guarantee current subscription revenue streams in a growing climate of demand for open access on the part of researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the research?

To repeat: In what sense is green OA self-archiving a "compromise"?

A compromise of what, with what, for whom?

Is a university repository manager a representative of the immediate interests of the university's researchers (and their institutions, funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the research), or of the interests of publishers and their present and future business models?

If librarians are to fulfill the role of repository managers, they need to re-think what they are doing, and why, and what it is that researchers and research need in the OA era.

An OA IR is not a buy-in collection of journal subscriptions: It is a give-away provision of access to an institution's published journal articles.

An OA IR manager is not a serials librarian, nor someone appointed to direct or second-guess the future course of serials publishing.

An OA IR manager is someone appointed to make sure the university's OA IR is filled with its primary target content: the university's published journal article output.

"UKCoRR has a vision of the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions." -- What is that "professionally recognised and supported role" if it is not filling their institution's repository with its intended content?

GS: "The road to open access is covered in gold and this is the way forward."

The way forward for whom? And according to whom? And in the interests of what?

Researchers can be mandated to provide green OA for their published work. (Without mandates, only about 20% or articles are self-archived.)

And funds -- if any are available -- can be provided to pay for gold OA.

But publishers cannot be mandated to provide gold OA.

And the funds to pay for gold OA cannot be mandated while they are still tied up in paying for subscriptions (and while the asking price for gold OA is designed to preserve publishers' current revenue streams and modus operandi, come what may).

The road to green OA is wide open, and traversing it is entirely in the hands of researchers (and their institutions and funders).

The road to gold OA is not wide open; it costs money, and it is in the hands of publishers, not researchers. And the potential money to pay for gold OA is currently tied up in institutions' subscription fees, which are being paid to publishers, by institutions' libraries.

So how is the road to OA covered with gold, and how is it the way forward?

And what has this to do with the research repository manager's "professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions"?

GS: "A few days earlier, Kurt de Belder from Leiden University in the Netherlands had laid out his vision of the future, which assumed that open access would be via the gold route and if Repositories existed, they would only contain grey literature."

Kurt de Melder is the director of Leiden University's library (and an advisor to several publishers). Does his golden vision (like the green vision) include a practical means (like the green vision's mandates) of getting us from here to there? Or is it all just a golden wish, waiting passively (apart from any spare money being spent on pre-emptive gold OA payments) for publishers to convert to gold and release everyone's subscription money (for incoming journals) to pay their asking price for gold OA (for outgoing articles)?

And while the institution's library keeps waiting for this to happen directly, of its own accord, is the access, usage and impact of the institution's research output to continue to be denied to all but subscribing institutions, as it is today, while institutions' IRs (which already exist, by the way) are devoted instead to "grey literature" (whatever that means) instead of to refereed research (green OA)?

And meanwhile, visions aside, those who have their eyes wide open cannot help but notice that IRs (which already do exist, remember) do contain green content (20%) rather than just grey content, and that green deposit mandates can and do drive up the percentage green from the baseline 20% to 60%, and approaching 100% within a few years.

What's missing, and needed (for those with eyes wide open to see) is more green OA mandates from institutions and funders -- not armchair or dinner-table visions of the future of publishing, evoked in the thrall of pre-emptive gold fever (with no critical reflection on or answerability to practical means and ends).

That, perhaps (rather than gold fever), would come closer to a substantive "vision of the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions."

GS: "Personally, and not as Chair of UKCoRR (UK Council of Research Repositories), I must admit that I am starting to agree with the gold only route, although I'm not sure I should."

If the Chair of UK's Council of Research Repositories is starting to agree (whether personally or ex officio) with the gold-only route, then perhaps it is time for the Chair to think of resigning, and allowing UKCoRR's direction to be set by those who understand the needs of research and researchers, the power of green OA IRs, and the urgent need for Green OA mandates.

Surely there is a "UK Council of Publishing Business Models" that could be joined instead, by those who have become afflicted with gold fever, forgetting about research and researchers' urgent immediate need for OA, and IRs' mission to provide it.

GS: "I have been espousing the virtues of green open access for nearly five years. At Huddersfield we have 26% full text in the Repository despite not yet having a mandate and our full text downloads are really taking off - 46,000 in the last 12 months."

If that 26% is 26% of Huddersfield's current yearly research output, then that deposit rate is somewhat above the global spontaneous (i.e., unmandated) baseline deposit rate of about 20%, but it is a far cry from what the deposit rate would be if Huddersfield were to adopt a mandate.

A repository manager espousing the interests of Huddersfield's researchers should be espousing the virtues of green OA mandates to Huddersfield's researchers and administration, not just the virtues of providing green OA spontaneously (although that is, of course, welcome too).

Well over five years' consistent experience (and surveys) worldwide have shown that most researchers will not deposit spontaneously but they will deposit (willingly) if deposit is mandated. In the past few years, it is not spontaneous deposit rates that have been picking up, but the rate of adoption of deposit mandates, and the resulting green OA.

This is not the time for repository managers to succumb to gold fever (which leads next to nowhere, and is not even part of their remit), resigning their IRs to warehousing "grey literature."

GS: "However, for some time I have had my doubts as to whether the championing of green open access was actually taking us down the right road. I could see that gold open access was a good business model. "

If we all commit to deposit, we don't need green OA self-archiving mandates.

But we don't all commit to deposit, even though it costs nothing. Only about 20% commit unmandated (26% at Huddersfield, perhaps because the IR manager has for five years espoused the virtues of spontaneous deposit so persuasively).

But even fewer commit to gold OA, because it costs money, because most of the top journals don't offer it, and because the money to pay for it is still tied up in paying for subscriptions.

And there are no mandates to require researchers to pay for gold OA, nor to release the subscription money, nor to dictate publishers' business model or modus operandi, nor to set their asking price.

Besides, none of that is within an OA IR manager's remit. It has nothing to do with "the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions."

An OA IR manager is supposed to get his IR filled with OA's target content, and that target content is supposed to be, first and foremost, peer-reviewed journal articles, most of which are today still being published in subscription journals.

What needs to be championed by IR managers (and a fortiori, by the Chair of the UK Council of Research Repositories), and championed for their researchers and their institutions, are the virtues of green OA mandates that will fill their IRs -- not the virtues of "good business models," championed for publishers, by librarians. (You don't need to be a "professional and supported" IR manager to go down that road.)

And those who are indeed committed to championing green OA mandates worldwide are beginning to win them.

GS: "The trouble to me is that the [gold OA] model only really works if we all commit. Otherwise, you end up paying twice, once for the open access article and once for the journal subscription. I just didn't see how we arrived at this brave new world of gold open access journals, no serials budgets and stuff in the cloud."

Yes, that's indeed the size of it: "The [gold OA] model only really works if we all commit. Otherwise, you end up paying twice, once for the open access article and once for the journal subscription."

Trying to go directly from the status quo to gold OA is quite simply self-contradictory, like an Escher drawing of an impossible shape:

Institutional subscription access tolls are paid per incoming journal; individual OA publication fees are paid per outgoing article. The money to pay for gold OA fees is tied up in subscription tolls. But institutions cannot cancel their journal subscriptions unless the journals' contents are accessible to their users otherwise. Institutions are not necessarily even subscribing annually, for their users, to the same journals in which their researchers are occasionally publishing. Catch 22.

(And, as Graham notes, anyone foolish and gullible enough to believe hybrid gold publishers (the ones who charge both subscription tolls + optional gold OA fees) when they say they will reduce subscription tolls proportionately as gold OA fee revenues increase is forgetting that this requires institutions to find the money to pay the gold asking price first, while it is still being spent on the subscriptions! A good "business model" indeed)

(By the way, the somewhat uneven distribution of wealth on the planet can also be fixed "if we all commit." That's not just gold fever, it's the Golden Rule -- but alas far too few in our gene pool are committed to practising it...)

GS: "But maybe I can see how we get to gold open access now? With researchers taking ownership of the 'game' by realising that gold open access is the only way to ensure access for all and increased citations, maybe we are on the right road after all?"

Researchers "taking ownership of the 'game'"? by "reaising that gold OA is the only way"?

The self-contradiction on the road to there from here is resolved by "realisation"? By researchers? (The same researchers for whom the only thing they need to do to provide OA is a few keystrokes? And they're not even "committed" enough to do those keystrokes, unless they are first mandated by their institutions or funders?)

What does this vision envision that researchers are to do with this newfound golden realisation of theirs? The same thing 34,000 of them did (unsuccessfully) back in 2000? Sign a petition to boycott their journals if they don't go OA?

And if researchers were really that committed to "ensuring access for all and increased citations," wouldn't it be simpler than making empty threats against all their publishers just to petition their one and only institution to mandate deposit?

Better still, if their realisation about "the only way" were that profound, wouldn't researchers just go ahead and do the keystrokes to deposit of their own accord, unmandated, in order to "ensure access for all, and increased citations"?

And would it not be a remarkable coincidence it it turned out that the most pressing thing on researchers' minds was not, in fact, the access and impact of their work (which they can already maximize with a few green keystrokes), but a "good business model" for their publishers and their long-suffering librarians?

A remarkable coincidence that what researchers had been yearning for all along turned out (upon "realisation") to be exactly the same thing their librarians had been yearning for -- which was not the filling of their OA IRs but relief from the serials crisis?

GS: "And maybe, instead of the superfast highway to gold open access that some envisage, are we travelling down the leafy lane of green open access with gold just around the next corner? A bit round the houses, but yes we are certainly getting there."

The super-fast highway to gold OA? Amidst all this "realisation," I don't recall hearing the game plan for solving the problem of the toll booths posted along the ubiquitous subscription highways -- the ones that are currently gobbling up institutions' serial budgets (i.e., the funds that would be used instead to pay for gold OA)...

But it is true that green OA, once it becomes universal, may eventually get us to gold OA too -- if universal availability of green eventually causes universal cancellations, forcing journals to cut costs, downsize, and convert to gold OA, thereby releasing the windfall subscription savings to pay the reduced cost of gold OA (peer review alone, with the print and online editions gone, and all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the worldwide network of OA IRs).

But that's not around the next corner, when we're still at 20% green OA.

And we are certainly getting ahead of ourselves, if we don't provide the universal green OA first -- for that's what any eventual subscription cancellation windfall is dependent upon. The cancellations can't be done pre-emptively. Certainly not by a single institution, or IR manager -- not even the Chair of the UK Council of Research Repositories. That would require universal institutional subscription cancellations, and all at once (not one institution or country at a time -- otherwise the researchers of that institution or country, instead of gaining open access, lose subscription access altogether).

My recommendation to OA IR managers who envision "the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions" would be to focus on their own mandate, which is to fill their own institution's IRs, not to dream about business models that are as good as gold.

And the way to get their OA IRs filled is already known: It is by getting their institutions to mandate green OA. (No one connected in any way with OA IRs has a more "professionally recognised and supported role within [their] research institutions" then Southampton's Les Carr and Harvard's Stuart Shieber, the architects of their respective institutions' green OA mandates (Southampton's being the first and Harvard's the most famous). It's not too late for Huddersfield -- or Nottingham, or the rest of the 17,000 universities that have not yet adopted a mandate.

That's all. And that's enough. Mandate green OA for your institution and rest will take care of itself, in its own time. But meanwhile your institution's researchers will "ensure access for all, and increased citations."

That, after all -- not "a good business model" -- is the purpose of OA, and hence the mandate of OA IR managers.

See "Waiting for Gold"
(from the 2002 BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ).

Postscript:
On 2010-07-30, at 2:50 AM, Charles Oppenheim [CO] wrote in JISC-Repositories:

CO: "Mr Stone's (and other repository managers') Job Specifications may say something like "your job is to ensure that articles produced by staff in this University are made OA, whether by means of the Institutional Repository or by any other means deemed appropriate." So, whilst not disagreeing with the argument that the priority should be green repositories, repository managers should not ignore alternative approaches that also produce increased downloads and citations and promote the institution's reputation. Even if their job specification is tied to their IR, it would be an unprofessional Repository Manager who was not interested in the pros and cons of alternative methods for achieving OA. Being professional means taking a holistic view of things! I see nothing incompatible therefore between Mr Stone's remarks and being chairman of UKCoRR."

But GS had written:

GS: "I have been espousing the virtues of green open access for nearly five years However, for some time I have had my doubts as to whether the championing of green open access was actually taking us down the right road Kurt de Belder... assumed that open access would be via the gold route and if Repositories existed, they would only contain grey literature I must admit that I am starting to agree with the gold only route"

And CO has replied:

CO: "...priority should be given to green repositories..."

If the university repository manager's "job is to ensure that articles produced by staff in this University are made OA, whether by means of the Institutional Repository or by any other means deemed appropriate," it is not clear why the job is called "repository manager."

(It sounds like something more like "publication advisor" -- and if that advice is to take the gold only route, then it sounds like an anti-repository manager!)

Rather than twist simple and obvious job descriptions into complicated ideological knots, might it not be more sensible to look carefully at the concrete, practical reasons why repository managers' "priority should be [filling] green repositories" rather than "the gold only route"?

After all, GS himself wrote that the "trouble to me is that the [gold OA] model only really works if we all commit. Otherwise, you end up paying twice."

But GS never went on to explain how to surmount this impasse (whereas my posting [above] explains quite explicitly why you could not -- unless universal green OA came first).

Yet this impasse did not seem to deter Huddersfield's green repository manager and UKCoRR's chairman from announcing that he was "starting to agree with the gold only route" because he "could see that gold open access was a good business model."

CO: "And before Stevan explodes at this posting, let me say (yet again) that I am a strong supporter of the green approach to OA. But I am not blind to the existence, and in some cases success, of alternative OA approaches."

Indisputably there is not one but two ways to provide OA. (We -- CO and 8 other co-authors -- defined the two ways ourselves in a Nature Web Focus six years ago:

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

But from the capability of providing OA to some of the planet's annual 2.5 million refereed journal articles in two different ways, green and gold, it does not follow that each of the ways is capable of scaling up to providing OA to all (or even much or most) of the planet's annual 2.5 million refereed journal articles.

This is where the sticky Escherian details (about annual percentage green and gold OA, ongoing subscription needs and commitments, double payment, and especially the power of green mandates) come in.

Surely the practical and professional mandate of the newly minted job title "repository manager" is not just a matter of abstract principles but of concrete, practical reality.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum