Open Access Archivangelism

CC-BY OR CC-NC?

CC-BY or CC-NC?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UK Gold Open Access Infrastructure

What UK institutions (and RCUK) need far more urgently than an RCUK compliance mechanism to collect, monitor and disburse the UK funds for Gold double-payments (sic) is an RCUK compliance monitoring mechanism for cost-free Green OA -- and HEFCE/REF have proposed a natural way to accomplish this:

1. HEFCE proposes to make immediate deposit of the final draft of peer reviewed articles in the institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication, a requirement for eligibility for submission to REF 2020.

2. Immediate deposit is required (a) irrespective of whether the deposited draft is made immediately OA or embargoed for an allowable interval, (b) irespective of whether it is published in a subscription journal or a Gold OA journal, (c) irrespective of whether further re-use rights are licensed (e.g., CC-BY).

3. The immediate-deposit would apply immediately, since researchers cannot foresee which 4 articles will prove to be their best (and hence submitted to REF) 6 years hence, and delayed deposit would make the articles ineligible.

4. Hence the natural procedure for each institution is to systematically collect and store the calendar date of the acceptance letter as well as the date of deposit for all articles published. (The former can be made a repository meta-data field; the latter already is.)

That done, institutions can go back to counting the gold chicks allotted them by RCUK's golden hen, knowing that their RCUK mandate requirements are already fulfilled via Green. No worries about running out of money to pay for publication.

And the added bonus is that if the Gold is not spent on paying publishers even more money than is being spent already for subscriptions, any leftover can now be spent on facilitating and implementing Green OA and monitoring compliance (see replies of Doug Kell to the BIS Parliamentary Select Committee about what can be done with the RCUK Gold OA funds if there is no need to spend them on Gold OA).

The natural next step toward global OA will be to integrate institutional and funder mandates worldwide to make them convergent and mutually reinforcing. HEFCE/REF have shown the way to do so.

This will also put the UK back into the worldwide OA leadership role it had from 2004-2012 and then lost with the Finch Committee's egregious proposal to mandate paid Gold (by restricting UK authors' right to choose their journals for their quality standards alone, rather than their cost-recovery model, and by redirecting scarce research funds to double-pay publishers for Gold OA instead of just providing cost-free Green OA).

Harnad Follow-Up Comments to BIS Select Committee on Open Access

Follow-Up Comments to BIS OA Select Committee

Stevan Harnad

video -- transcript

In the online era, the sole remaining barrier separating both the UK and the rest of the world from Open Access (OA) to their refereed research journal article output is keystrokes. It is important to bear this in mind in considering the following comments. Once global OA policy has seen to it that those keystrokes are being universally and systematically executed worldwide, not only OA itself, with all its resulting benefits for research productivity and progress, but all the other desiderata sought the end of Green OA embargoes, a transition to Gold OA publishing at a fair and sustainable price, CC-BY, text-mining, open data will follow as a natural matter of course.

But not if the keystroke barrier is not first surmounted, decisively and globally.

It is in the interests of surmounting this keystroke barrier to global OA that this summary strongly supports the institutional-repository immediate-deposit mandate proposed by HEFCE/REF to complement and reinforce the RCUK OA mandate.

Embargoes: About 60% of subscription journals (including most of the top journals in most fields) affirm their authors right to provide immediate, un-embargoed Green Open Access (OA) to the peer-reviewed final draft of their articles by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication as well as making them OA immediately. The remaining 40% of journals impose an embargo of 6-12-24+ months on Green OA.

The optimal solution is for research funders and institutions to mandate that authors deposit the peer-reviewed final draft of all their articles in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication, set access to the 60% of deposits that are un-embargoed as Open Access immediately, and set access to the other 40% as Closed Access during the embargo.

This means that for the 40% of the immediate-deposits that are embargoed, users web-wide will still have immediate access to the bibliographic metadata (author, title, journal, abstract) during the embargo, and individual users can request an individual copy for research purposes by clicking the repositorys request copy Button; the author receives an immediate email and can then authorize emailing the requested eprint with one click.

This compromise is not OA but Almost-OA and it can tide over user needs during any allowable embargo period as long as all the papers are systematically deposited immediately, not just the un-embargoed ones.

Regardless of whether the author publishes in a subscription journal or a Gold OA journal, regardless of whether the OA is immediate or embargoed, regardless of how long an OA embargo is allowed, OA mandates should require immediate deposit of all papers upon acceptance for publication.

This ensures that everything is deposited, as clocked by the date of the journal acceptance letter, that 60% is immediately Green OA, and that the remaining 40% can have Almost-OA during the embargo.

This is a practical compromise that has already been tested and demonstrated to be effective. To insist instead on mandating immediate or almost-immediate Green OA (i.e., no or almost no embargo at all), needlessly risks non-compliance by authors, who will not give up their right to publish in their journal of choice simply because the journal embargoes Green OA. The right compromise is to mandate immediate deposit, and to tolerate embargoes for the time being. Once mandatory immediate deposit with 60% immediate-OA and 40% Almost-OA becomes universal, embargoes will shrink and disappear as a natural matter of course, under global pressure from the growth and benefits of OA. But everything must be immediately deposited first.

An immediate institutional-deposit mandate, as proposed by HEFCE/REF, will also recruit institutions to monitor and ensure timely compliance with the HEFCE mandate in order to be eligible for REF, thereby remedying the current defect in the RCUK OA mandate, which has compliance mechanisms for Gold OA compliance, but none for Green OA compliance.

Access Rights vs. Re-Use Rights (CC-BY): Online access to peer-reviewed research, free to all users, not just subscribers, is urgently needed in all fields of scholarly and scientific research. There exists no field of research publication in which access-denial is not a problem: for users, in terms of lost access to findings, for authors, in terms of lost user uptake and usage of their findings, and for the tax-paying public who fund the research, there is the lost return on their investment, in terms of lost research uptake, usage, applications, impact, productivity and progress.

Apart from the urgent and universal need for access to research findings, there are also further potential benefits from being able to re-use the texts of the articles in various ways: to text-mine and data-mine them by machine as well as to re-publish them in various new re-mixes or mashups.

However, this further need for re-use rights, over and above online-access rights is neither urgent nor universal. In some fields, such as crystallography, certain journal-article re-use rights would indeed be very useful today; but in most fields the need for journal-article re-use rights is not pressing. Indeed many authors may not even want to allow it -- especially in the humanities, where preserving text-integrity is particularly important, but also in other scholarly and scientific fields where authors are resistant to allowing re-mix and re-publication rights on their verbatim texts:

Note that all users that can access them are of course already free to re-use the findings (i.e., the content of the texts) of published articles (as long as author credit is provided through citation). But free online access already allows the re-use of findings. Text re-mixes and re-publication are another matter.

Moreover, there is an important negative interaction between re-use rights and publisher embargoes on Green OA: If Green OA did not just mean online-access rights, but also re-use and re-publication rights (e.g., CC-BY), then publishers would understandably be much more inclined to embargo Green OA: For if they authorized immediate re-publication rights, their own opportunity to recover their investment could be undercut by rival publishers free-riding on their content immediately upon publication! So subscription publisher embargoes on Green OA (now only 40%) would multiply and lengthen if re-use rights, over and above free online access, were mandated too.

The optimal OA policy is hence to mandate only free online access, and leave it up to the publisher and the author what further re-use rights they may wish to grant.

Once mandatory Green OA prevails universally, all this will change, and authors will be able to grant whatever rights they wish. But pre-emptive insistence on re-use rights today will only serve to further retard and constrain basic access-rights and provoke author resistance and noncompliance.

Author Choice and Journal Quality: One of the most fundamental rights of scholars and scientists is the right to choose whether, when and where to publish their findings. It is a great (and unnecessary) strategic mistake and will only generate author resistance and policy failure to try to force scientists and scholars to choose journals based on the journals economic model (subscription or Gold), licensing policy (CC-BY) or embargo length instead of the journals quality and suitability.

Journals earn quality track-records on the basis of the level of the peer-review standards that they maintain. Researchers as well as their institutions and funders want to meet the highest quality standards they can. And users rely on them to judge what work is of sufficient quality to risk investing their scarce time and resources into reading, using, and trying to apply and build upon. Unreliable and invalid research can retard productivity and progress just as surely as access-denial can.

The only requirement of an OA mandate should be immediate deposit of the final draft, with as short an embargo on OA as feasible, and as many re-use rights as the author can and wishes to allow. No restriction on journal choice, which should be based on journal quality-standards alone.

Gold OA and CC-BY should be left as options for authors to choose if and when they wish. They will grow naturally of their own accord once mandatory immediate-deposit becomes universal.

Pre-Emptive Unilateral Double-Payment by the UK: The UK publishes about 6% of the worlds annual research output. The majority of journals today are subscription journals. Hence the UK pays for about 6% of worldwide annual institutional journal subscriptions. Gold OA fees are additional expenditure, over and above what the UK spends on annual subscriptions, because institutional Gold OA fees are for providing OA to UK output (6%) whereas institutional subscriptions are for buying in access to incoming articles from other institutions, both in the UK (6%) and the rest of the world (94%). So institutional journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled until not only UK articles but the remaining 94% of published articles are made OA.

Suppose the UK decides unilaterally to pay Gold OA fees for all of its annual research output. That increases UK publication spending already stretched to the limit today -- by 6%, to 106% of what it is today. Some of this extra UK expenditure (out of already scarce and overstretched research funds) will simply be extra payments to pure Gold OA publishers; some of it will be double-payments to hybrid subscription/Gold publishers. Both mean double-payment on the part of the UK (subscriptions + Gold); but hybrid Gold also means double-dipping on the part of hybrid Gold publishers.

Some hybrid Gold publishers have promised to give a subscription rebate proportional to their uptake of hybrid Gold. If all publishers offered hybrid Gold (as they can all do, easily and at no extra cost, in order to earn UKs unilaterally mandated Gold subsidy) and all gave full rebates on subscriptions, that would mean that all subscribers worldwide would receive a 6% rebate on their subscriptions, thanks to the UKs unilateral double-payment.

But for the UK, this would mean that the UK gets back in subscriptions only 6% of the 6% that the UK has double-paid for hybrid Gold OA (6% x 6% = 0.4% UK rebate), while the rest of the world gets a rebate of 94% of the 6% that the UK (alone) has unilaterally double-paid for hybrid Gold OA (6% x 94% = 5.6% rebate to the rest of the world).

In other words, unilateral UK hybrid Gold OA double-payments not only make UK output OA for the UK and the rest of the world, but, if rebated, they also subsidize the subscriptions of the rest of the world. (This is a classic Prisoners Dilemma, in which it is to the rest of the worlds advantage to mandate cost-free Green, and at the same time cash in on the rebate from the UKs unilateral Gold mandate.)

The optimal RCUK policy is hence to leave it up to authors whether they wish to pick and pay for the Gold OA option, but on no account require or prefer Gold, and particularly in the case of hybrid Gold OA.

(If publishers instead gave the full Gold OA rebate to the subscribing institution, that would be tantamount to letting all subscribing institutions publish Gold OA at no cost a subscription deal that publishers are not likely to be in a big hurry to make, because if it scaled it would leave subscriptions hanging from a skyhook! Even the premise that all hybrid Gold OA publishers would indeed faithfully refrain from double-dipping by giving a full rebate for the UK 6% Gold by reducing worldwide subscription costs by 6% is a very tenuous assumption.)

UK Leadership in OA: The UK was indeed the worldwide leader in OA from 2000-2012, thanks to the contributions of JISC, EPrints, and especially the 2004 Parliamentary Select Committee which first recommended that UK funders and institutions mandate Green OA. RCUK followed this UK Green OA recommendation and it has since been followed by 80 funders and over 200 institutions worldwide.

But this UK world leadership in OA ended in 2012 with the Finch Report and the resulting new RCUK policy of (1) restricting UK authors journal choice, (2) downgrading Green OA, and (3) preferring and funding Gold OA and CC-BY, when what was really needed was only a (cost-free) upgrading of the RCUK compliance monitoring and assurance mechanism for Green OA.

Fortunately, HEFCE/REF has now proposed precisely the upgraded Green OA compliance mechanism that can once again earn back the UKs worldwide leadership role in OA:

In order to be eligible for submission for REF 2020, all peer-reviewed journal articles must be deposited in the authors institutional repository immediately upon publication (not retrospectively), regardless of whether they are published in a subscription journal or a Gold OA journal, regardless of whether their license is CC-BY, and regardless of whether OA to the immediate-deposit is immediate or embargoed.

Green OA Compliance Mechanism: The proposed HEFCE/REF immediate institutional-deposit mandate overcomes all the major obstacles and objections concerning author restrictions on journal choice, embargo lengths, sufficiency and disbursement of Gold OA funding, double payment, double-dipping, and (unavailable or unwanted) re-use rights:

All UK authors can publish in their journal of choice and no author is prevented from publishing for lack of Gold OA funds. Institutions are recruited to monitor and verify compliance with the immediate-deposit requirement for their own research output, ensuring that all deposits are made on or near the calendar date of acceptance for publication. Access is immediately Green OA (60%) or Almost-OA (40% during any allowable embargo period) (via the repositorys request a copy Button), thereby remedying the RCUK policys failure to provide a mechanism for ensuring Green OA compliance.

OA Benefits: The primary benefit of OA is that it ensures that no would-be user of the research is denied access for lack of subscription access.

As has been demonstrated in study after study, in every scholarly and scientific field: OA maximizes research downloads and citations, thereby maximizing research uptake, usage, applications, productivity and progress.

Gold OA Transitional Costs: The secondary benefit of OA is that it will eventually make publishing less costly. But for this to happen, Green OA must be universally mandated first. Pre-emptive double-payment (subscriptions plus Gold OA fees) by the UK, unilaterally, would just mean that the UK was paying even more than it is already paying for subscriptions, in order to make its own research output OA (Gold CC-BY). This is a highly counterproductive policy.

The UK should lead the way toward effectively mandated Green OA worldwide. Once Green OA is universal, institutional subscription cancellation pressure will force publishers to downsize and convert to Gold OA at a fair price, paid for out of institutional subscription cancellation windfall savings instead of double-paid, as with the unilateral pre-emptive Gold funding proposed by Finch/RCUK.

The worldwide network of Green OA repositories will take over the function of access-provision and archiving, unbundling the management of peer review to leave it as the sole remaining essential value still provided by peer-reviewed journal publishing and hence the sole remaining publishing cost. This Fair Gold” will cost a fraction of the current price per article, reckoned as 1/Nth of the worldwide subscription revenue of a subscription journal publishing N articles per year today. Hence Fair Gold will cost an order of magnitude less than the ￡500 - ￡5000+ asking-price for Gold OA today. (Please see the evidence of Swan & Houghton on the Green/Gold transition and the relative cost/benefits of Green and Gold OA, unilaterally vs. universally.)

Brief notes on points that arose during the Committee Hearing:
HEFCE/REF mandate proposal: The proposed HEFCE/REF institutional immediate-deposit mandate, if adopted, will completely remedy the flaws of the Finch/RCUK policy.

Embargoes and compromise: An interim compromise is needed on the problem of publisher embargoes on Green OA: The optimal compromise is not to insist on double-paying for immediate Gold CC-BY today, preemptively, unilaterally and needlessly, with all its perverse consequences, but instead to mandate immediate deposit of all articles independently of whatever allowable Green OA embargo length is agreed upon.

Journal Prestige & Price: A journals prestige is based on its public track-record for quality. A journals quality depends on its peer-review standards. The higher the quality standards, the more rigorous and selective is the peer reviewing. The cost per accepted, published article of a highly selective, high-standard journal can be higher because the cost for the peer review of all the submitted and refereed articles that did not meet the journals quality standard must be factored into the price of every accepted article. With post-Green Fair-Gold not only is the cost of peer review unbundled from the cost of access-provision and archiving, but peer review can be provided on a no fault basis, with each round of the peer-review service paid for, per paper submitted, irrespective of whether the outcome is acceptance, revision, or revision/resubmission and re-refereeing. This unbundling will re-distribute the cost of the peer review service equitably, so the no-fault peer review fee (1) discourages authors from making unrealistic submissions to journals whose quality standards their work is unlikely to meet, as in the days when peer-review was paid for by subscriptions and hence cost-free to the author, and (2) discourages journals from accepting substandard articles in order to earn more peer review revenues, because their revenue is based on peer review rather than acceptance, and their reputation depends on their track-record for quality.

Publishing costs as research costs: It has been repeatedly stated (particularly by the Wellcome Trust) that publishing costs are just a small part of research costs (c. 1.5%), and hence that research funders should be prepared to pay them as such in the form of Gold OA fees. This sounds fine from the standpoint of a research funder like Wellcome, which need only fund research. But, as noted above, most publication costs today are paid in the form of institutional journal subscriptions. Wellcome does not pay the institutional journal subscriptions of its fundees institutions: Those are paid by others, from other resources. Hence Wellcome payment of Gold OA fees (at todays inflated asking-price, and often paid to hybrid subscription/Gold journals) is double-payment, but the double-payment is not by Wellcome. The UK government is ultimately paying for both journal subscriptions and RCUK Gold OA fees. Hence Wellcomes motto that publishing costs are just a small part of research costs cannot be applied to UK governmental funding until UK subscription costs no longer need to be paid and peer review costs have been unbundled and offered as Gold OA at a fair price. In other words, after global Green OA has prevailed globally.

Disproportionate publication costs for research-intensive institutions and countries: When publishing costs are paid by the institutions that provide the research (in the form of Gold OA fees) instead of by the institutions that consume the research (in the form of subscription fees), more research-intensive institutions pay more than less research intensive institutions do. But, as Houghton & Swan have shown, both will still pay substantially less than they are paying today in subscriptions, because the price of post-Green Fair-Gold publishing (freed from double-payment and downsized -- by universal Green -- to peer-review costs alone) will be so much lower than the current price of subscription publishing.

The cost of institutional repositories: Most institutions in the UK, EU and US already have institutional repositories (for a variety of institutional purposes, including OA). Their start-up costs were low, and have already been invested. Their annual maintenance costs (a server and some sysad time) are low, and part of existing institutional network infrastructure. The cost per paper deposited in an institutional repository is virtually zero, yet this represents the institutions contribution to globally distributed access-provision and archiving. (Even for a global central repository like Arxiv, the price per paper is less than $7.) This is what will permit the current publication price per article paid in the form of worldwide institutional subscriptions to be reduced to just the price of peer review alone.

Finch on repositories: The Finch report, under the influence of publishers, suggested that Green OA is a failure in practise as well as inadequate in principle, so Finch accordingly recommended downgrading institutional repositories to the role of (1) data-archiving, (2) digital preservation, and (3) linking data to publishers websites, where the articles reside. It should be evident now that this was a self-serving assessment on the part of publishers (as was Elseviers Alicia Wises plea during the BIS hearing not to have institutional repositories needlessly duplicate access-providing and archiving functions that publishers already perform: Leave it to us!). What institutional repositories need in order to successfully provide OA to journal articles is for funders and institutions to upgrade their Green OA mandates and compliance mechanisms to ensure immediate deposit of all articles, as proposed by HEFCE/REF (see above).

Publisher deposit: Publishers, in an effort to retain control over as much of the transition to OA as possible, have proposed to deposit papers (in institution-external repositories), on behalf of their authors, on publishers terms and timetables. On no account should publishers be relied upon to ensure compliance with OA mandates: the mandates apply to researchers, not to publishers. Publishers are happy to comply when they are paid for Gold. But it is not in publishers interests to comply with Green -- nor are they required to do so. Authors are perfectly capable of doing the few keystrokes of self-archiving for themselves, at no cost. Once again, the optimal policy is HEFCE/REFs, which proposes mandating immediate-deposit, by the author, in the authors institutional repository, immediately upon publication. Institutions can then monitor and ensure timely compliance for their own institutional publication output, in their own institutional repository.

Complementary self-archiving mandates from funders and institutions: The RCUK/HEFCE/REF OA mandates can and should be complemented by institutional OA mandates, likewise requiring immediate-deposit, as well as designating institutional immediate-deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting published articles for institutional performance review. Belgium has provided the optimal integrated institution/funder model for this.

Patents, plagiarism: Both patents and plagiarism are red herrings, insofar as OA is concerned. OA concerns access to published articles. What authors wish to conceal, they do not publish, hence OA is moot. Plagiarism is possible with all published work, OA or non-OA. OA merely makes the words accessible to all users, not just subscribers. And inasmuch as copyright protects against plagiarism, it protects OA and non-OA work equally. Even CC-BY requires acknowledgement of authorship (thats what the BY refers to) (although in a mash-up, the re-mix of words, even listing all authors, can be rather like crediting body-parts in a common grave); but for now, allowing CC-BY should be left entirely a matter of author choice.

Institutional vs. central repositories: All OAI-compliant repositories are interoperable, hence harvestable and hence searchable as if they were all one global archive. So it does not matter technically or functionally where articles are deposited, as long as they are deposited immediately (and made OA). But it matters a great deal strategically -- for the effectiveness of mandates, for compliance verification, and to minimize author keystrokes, effort and hence resistance and resentment that mandates should require institutional deposit (and just once). Once, deposited, the metadata can be automatically exported to or harvested by other repositories, so they can be searched at a central-repository level for a discipline, nation, or globally.

Evidence of harm: Publishers often speak of repositories and Green OA self-archiving in terms of the presence or absence of harm. But one must ask what harm means in this context: Increased access, downloads and citations overall are certainly not evidence of harm -- to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D businesses and the tax-paying public -- quite the contrary, irrespective of whether the increase usage occurs at the publishers website or institutional repositories. Nor is it clear that if and when mandatory Green OA should eventually make subscriptions unsustainable -- inducing cost-cutting and a transition to Gold OA at a fair price and without double-payment -- that this should be counted as harm rather than as yet another benefit of OA -- to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D businesses and the tax-paying public -- in the natural evolution of scientific and scholarly communication with technology (bringing not just universal research access, but lower publication cost), to which the publishing industry can and must and will adapt, rather than the reverse.

Embargoes and compromise: It has to be clearly understood that embargoes on providing Open Access to the authors final draft are imposed by the publisher in order to protect and sustain subscription revenues and the subscription model. If the objective is a transition to sustainable Gold OA at a fair price, publisher OA embargoes are not in the interests of the research community. However, as a compromise, they can be tolerated, for the time being, as long as the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit mandate proposal is adopted.

Redirecting funds: It is premature to speak of redirecting funds from subscription payment to Gold OA payment. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled until the journal articles are accessible in another way. That other way is Green OA. Hence Green OA must be universally mandated first. The alternative is double-payment and double-dipping (see above).

Added value: The values added by publishers to the authors un-refereed draft are: (1) peer-review, (2) copy-editing, (3) formatting & tagging, (4) print edition, (5) online PDF edition, (6) access-provision, (7) archiving. Once Green OA is universally mandated, (3) (7) become obsolete. It is not clear how much copy-editing (2) is still being done or needed. So the only remaining essential post-Green function of peer-reviewed journal publishing is the service of peer review (1). This is what can be paid for as Gold OA, at a fair, sustainable post-Green price.

Hybrid gold and embargo: One of the perverse effects of the Finch reports recommendation to require authors to pick and pay for Gold OA if a journal offers it is to encourage subscription publishers to offer hybrid Gold as an option and to adopt and lengthen Green OA embargo periods beyond the allowable limit, so as to make sure that authors must pick and pay for Gold. This is why the Green option must always be allowed and embargo limits must not be draconian.

Open data vs article access: It is a misunderstanding as well as a strategic mistake to conflate open data and OA. The purpose of data is to be used. In general, the one who gathered the data must be allowed fair first data-mining rights. After that, it is reasonable for the funder to require that the data be made open for re-use. But articles are not data, and authors must be allowed to decide whether or not to allow their text to be re-used. (The findings and ideas can of course always be re-used, with acknowledgement; but that is not the same thing as re-using, re-mixing or re-publishing the verbatim text itself.)

Discipline differences: There may be discipline differences in the length of OA embargo needed to sustain subscriptions, but there are no discipline differences in the need for free online access to research for all would-be users, not just those who have subscription access.

Reasonable access: At the hearings it was asked what is reasonable access: its free online access to peer-reviewed research, immediately upon publication.

Paid Gold OA Versus Free Gold OA: Against Color Cacophony

1. The Green/Gold Open Access (OA) distinction concerns whether it is the author or the publisher that provides the OA.

2. This distinction was important to mark with clear terms because the conflation of the two roads to OA has practical implications and has been holding up OA progress for a decade and a half.

3. The distinction between paid Gold and free Gold is very far from being a straightforward one.

4. Free Gold can be free (to the author) because the expenses of the Gold journal are covered by subscriptions, subsidies or volunteerism.

5. The funds for Paid Gold can come from the author's pocket, the author's research grant, the author's institution or the author's funder.

6. It would be both absurd and gratuitously confusing to mark each of these economic-model differences with a color-code.

7. Superfluous extra colors would also obscure the role that the colour-code was invented to perform: distinguishing author-side OA provision from publisher-side OA provision.

8. So, please, let's not have "diamond," "platinum" and "titanium" OA, despite the metallurgical temptations.

9. They amplify noise instead of pinpointing the signal, just as SHERPA/Romeo's parti-colored Blue/Yellow/Green spectrum (mercifully ignored by almost everyone) does.

10. OA is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed journal articles, not about cost-recovery models for OA publishing (Gold OA).

11. The Gold that publishers are fighting for and that researcher funders are subsidizing (whether "pure" or "hybrid") is paid Gold, not free Gold.

12. No one knows whether or how free Gold will be sustainable, any more than they know whether or how long subscription publishing can co-exist viably with mandatory Green OA.

13. So please leave the economic ideology and speculation out of the pragmatics of OA policy making by the research community (institutions and funders).

14. Cost-recovery models are the province of publishers (Gold OA).

15. What the research community needs to do is mandate OA provision.

16. The only OA provision that is entirely in the research community's hands is Green OA.

And, before you ask, please let's not play into the publishers' hands by colour-coding OA also in terms of the length of the publisher embargo: 3-month OA, 6-month OA, 12-month-OA, 24-month-OA, millennial OA: OA means immediate online access. Anything else is delayed access. (The only quasi-exception is the "Almost-OA" provided by the author via the institutional repository's email-eprint-request Button when complying with publisher embargoes -- but that too is clearly not OA, which is immediate, free online access.)

And on no account should the genuine, substantive distinction between Gratis OA (free online access) and Libre OA (free online access plus various re-use rights) be color-coded (with a different shade for every variety of CC license)!

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Paid-Gold OA, Free-Gold OA & Journal Quality Standards

Peter Suber has pointed out that "About 50% of articles published in peer-reviewed OA journals are published in fee-based journals" (as reported by Laakso & Bjork 2012).

Laakso & Bjork also report that "[12% of] articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers... immediately...".

That's 12% immediate Gold-OA for the (already selective) SCOPUS sample. The percentage is still smaller for the more selective Thomson-Reuters/ISI sample.

I think it cannot be left out of the reckoning about paid-Gold OA vs. free-Gold OA that:

(#1) most articles are not published as Gold OA at all today (neither paid-Gold nor free-Gold)

(#2) the articles of the quality that users need and want most are much less likely to be published as Gold OA (whether paid-Gold or free-Gold) today, and, most important,

(#3) the Gold OA articles of the quality that users need and want most today are less likely to be the free-Gold ones than the paid-Gold ones (even though the junk journals on Jeffrey Beall's "predatory" Gold OA journal list are all paid-Gold).

#2 and #3 are hypotheses, but I think they can be tested objectively.

A test for #2 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for Gold OA (including hybrid Gold) articles vs non-Gold subscription journal articles (excluding the ones that have been made Green OA) within the same subject (and language!) area.

A test for #3 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for paid-Gold (including hybrid Gold) vs free-gold articles within the same subject (and language!) area.

I mention this because I think just comparing the number of paid-Gold vs. free-Gold journals without taking quality into account could be misleading.

Against Publisher Deposit in Institutional Repositories

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!.)

SHERPA Again Amplifying Volume of Ambient Noise

In response to the Beta SHERPA/FACT "Funders and Authors Compliance Tool," I just want to register my regret and dismay that SHERPA is yet again slavishly amplifying the volume of the ambient noise instead of sensibly filtering out the signal.

For years SHERPA/ROMEO has been parroting publishers' every whim echolalically instead of cataloguing only the essential points of publisher policy for authors: Does the publisher endorse immediate Green OA to the peer-reviewed version? and if not, how long does the publisher propose to embargo it?

Instead, SHERPA faithfully formalizes every nuance of FUD and double-talk that publishers dream up -- I await a solemn stipulation that the author may only provide OA on Tuesdays, and only if they have a blue-eyed maternal uncle -- leaving users in a wash of useless and arbitrary detail and confusion.

Now this same indiscriminate parroting of ad-hoc improvisations issuing from the RCUK OA policy-makers has been given a megaphone in SHERPA/FACT.

Instead of leaving RCUK to work out a coherent policy before canonizing it, SHERPA/FACT treats the tentative vagaries of the RCUK policy-makers as if they made sense and were ready to be etched in Mosaic tablets for UK (and worldwide!) researchers to revere and obey.

Instead of agonizing over what journal they may or may not publish in, in order to comply with RCUK requirements, by working their way through the maze of SHERPA/FACT contingencies, RCUK authors would be best to publish in whatever journal they wish to publish in and deposit their refereed final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication (as HEFCE/REF requires).

Sensible authors should make their deposits OA immediately. Cautious or timid authors can look up the length of their publisher's embargo on OA (if any) and set access to the (immediate) deposit to be made OA when the embargo has elapsed. All authors can be confident that RCUK will (as announced) not be monitoring or "enforcing" Green embargo lengths for years to come, whilst the RCUK policy is being "re-evaluated."

And that's the only information SHERPA/FACT ought to be providing, apart from links to either the publisher's website or RCUK's website, so curious authors can see their respective caprices at first hand. (Green OA is not RCUK's "preferred option," but it is nevertheless reluctantly "allowed".)

As to the rest of the new RCUK policy -- the option that both publishers and RCUK/Wellcome are really interested in, namely, how the Gold subsidy is to be administered and disbursed -- nolo contendere, but the less said, the better: Once you've deposited your final draft in your institutional repository, forget about the Gold subsidy unless your chosen journal happens to be Gold.

Stevan Harnad

What Open Access Needs Today Is Mandates, Not Money

European Union requires Open Access: "Money is essential in OA, and only governments are able to provide sufficient funds on a major scale."

This conflates author-pays publishing in "Gold" OA journals with cost-free author self-archiving of articles published in subscription journals ("Green" OA).

No extra money is needed for Green OA self-archiving. It just requires a clear mandate (requirement) to self-archive, by depositing the author's final, peer-reviewed draft in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. The deposit should be made OA immediately (or after an embargo period whose allowable length should be as short as possible).

Research Councils UK, under the influence of the publisher lobby, has adopted a mandate that prefers to pay for Gold OA, though it also (reluctantly) allows Green OA. Fortunately, however, HEFCE (Higher Education Founding Council of England) has proposed to mandate immediate deposit of all articles as a precondition for eligibility for evaluation in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), an important source of top-sliced research funding for UK universities.

The EU OA mandate should be for Green OA only, with immediate deposit required (and no embargoes allowed to exceed 6 months). No extra money should be provided for Gold OA. Publication costs today are still being covered in full by worldwide institutional journal subscriptions. So paying for Gold OA today entails double-paying: subscriptions plus Gold OA fees (poached from scarce research funds).

Journal subscriptions cannot be canceled until all journal articles are available by some other means. Globally mandating Green OA will provide that other means. Then subscriptions can be cancelled, releasing the institutional funds to pay for Gold OA without having to double pay -- and also driving down the price of Gold OA (currently vastly inflated) to fair, affordable, sustainable levels, by offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide distributed network of Green OA institutional repositories (phasing out the publisher's print and online edition and their costs):

Post-Green Gold OA will be "Fair Gold." Today's pre-emptive, Pre-Green Gold OA is profligate "Fool's Gold."

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.

____ (2008) Waking OAs Slumbering Giant: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

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

____ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

____ (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.

____ (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine 18: 9/10

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

The Golden Road and the Green Driver

Quote/commentary on the replies of Johannes Fournier [JF] to Richard Poynder in
"The Open Access Interviews: Johannes Fournier, speaking for the Global Research Council."

JF: "Personally, I see one definite advantage of the Golden Road: it brings with it clear regulations as regards re-use. Contrastingly, self-archiving will often not provide the legal basis that allows for specific forms of re-use like text-and data-mining."

This is the classic example of "letting the 'best' become the enemy of the 'better'".

Free-access ("Gratis OA") is within reach (via universal Green OA mandates), free-access-plus-re-use-rights ("Libre OA") is not.

Re-use is use-less without access, and we are nowhere near having free-access to all, most, or much of the journal-article corpus.

Or, to put it another way, the first and foremost "use" is access. So losing more of the precious time (and use) that has already been lost by continuing to over-reach for re-use rights when users don't even grasp the use that is already within reach, is, for want of a better word, a persistent head-shaker in the slow, sad saga of OA.

JF: "My views on self-archiving mandates are grounded in the philosophy of the organisation that employs me. The DFG is self-governed by researchers And researchers dont like to be forced to do things, they like to be supported and encouraged. For that reason, the DFG encourages open access by funding opportunities that facilitate providing research results in open access."

If one thing has been learnt from the slow, sad saga of OA (now at least two decades old) it is that mandating OA works, but encouraging it doesn't.

And neither the DFG nor DFG researchers are any different in this regard. The notion that mandating OA would be an illegal constraint on academic freedom in the DFG remains just as wrong-headed today as it has been since the first day it began to be endlessly parroted -- as wrong-headed as the notion that mandating "publish or perish" (which is, of course, mandated in the DFG, just as it is everywhere else in the research world) would be an illegal constraint on academic freedom in the DFG.

JF: "a dichotomy between Green and Gold tends to obscure the question we really need to ask ourselves: what kind of mechanisms could be designed in order to shift money from acquisition budgets into publication funds? Because the transition to open access will only succeed if we find ways to reinvest those funds which are already used to pay for information provision."

The goal of Open Access to research is Open Access to research. If we had universal OA to research, the "serials crisis" would instantly become a minor matter rather than the life/death issue it is now (Think about it.)

But, yes, universal, sustainable OA will indeed entail a "shift [of] money from acquisition budgets into publication funds." The missing causal component in this irreproachable reasoning, however, is: "what will drive that shift?".

And that missing causal component (again: think about it) is universal mandatory Green OA self-archiving. (I will not, yet again, spell out the causal contingencies. See here and here.)

JF: "the need to buy the subscription content remains. Yet although the transition requires additional money, it might not be necessary to really pay twice: one could operate more economically if the subscription prices for a local library or for a consortium were adjusted to the growth of publication fees. Thats how to avoid so-called double-dipping I know this sounds very simple and might be rather complex in its implementation, especially because the implementation is likely to require that the funding streams are readjusted."

The "implementation" might be rather complex indeed, without mandatory Green OA to drive down costs and force the shift. About as complex as alleviating world hunger, disease or poverty by likewise "readjusting funding streams"...

Divide & Conquer

The new Finch/RCUK policy started off on the wrong foot from the very beginning, downgrading cost-free Green OA self-archiving and preferentially funding Gold OA publishing: double-paid Fool's Gold. That was already at the behest of the publishing lobby.

But unfortunately that was aided and abetted by OA advocates in the thrall of Gold Fever and Rights Rapture, needlessly over-reaching for more than just the free online access that is already within reach, and making even that yet again escape our grasp. Yes, the publisher lobby is trying to divide and conquer.

But it will not succeed, because the HEFCE/REF mandate proposal has come to the rescue, dividing deposit and access-setting, requiring that deposit be immediate, in the author's IR, and relegating publishers' embargoes only to access-setting. It is that dividing that will conquer.

Keystroke Mandates

("Re: RCUK fails to end green embargo confusion" THE 14 March 2013)

What a mess! With publishers eagerly pawing at the Golden Door, and RCUK hopelessly waffling at Green embargo limits and their enforcement.

But relief is on the way! HEFCE has meanwhile quietly and gently proposed a solution that will moot all this relentless cupidity and stupidity.

HEFCE has proposed to mandate that in order to be eligible for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the final, peer-reviewed drafts of all papers published as of 2014 will have to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon publication: no delays, no embargoes, no exceptions -- irrespective of whether the paper is published in a Gold OA journal or a subscription journal, and irrespective of the allowable length of the embargo on making the deposit OA: The deposit itself must be immediate.

This has the immense benefit that while the haggling continues about how much will be paid for Gold OA and how long Green OA may be embargoed, all papers will be faithfully deposited -- and deposited in institutional repositories, which means that all UK universities will thereby be recruited, as of 2014, to monitor and ensure that the deposits are made, and made immediately. (Institutions have an excellent track record for making sure that everything necessary for REF is done, and done reliably, because a lot of money and prestige is at stake for them.)

And one of the ingenious features of the proposed HEFCE/REF Green OA mandate is the stipulation that deposit may not be delayed: Authors cannot wait till just before the next REF, six years later, to do it. If the deposit was not immediate, the paper is ineligible for REF.

And, most brilliant stroke of all, this ensures that it is not just the 4 papers that are ultimately chosen for submission to REF that are deposited immediately -- for that choice is always a retrospective one, made after looking over the past 6 years' work, to pick the four best papers. Rarely will this be known in advance. So the safest policy will be to deposit all papers immediately, just in case.

This is precisely the compliance assurance mechanism the RCUK mandate so desperately needs in order to succeed, but the RCUK policy-makers have not yet had the wit to conceive and adopt. Well, HEFCE/REF have done it for them, bless them.

But immediate-deposit is not immediate-OA you say? Indeed it is not. It does, however, overcome OA's most formidable hurdle, which is getting all those papers into the institutional repositories, and right away: keystrokes. It is just those keystrokes that have stood between the research world and OA for over over two decades now.

Once the institutional repositories are reliably being filled to 100%, does anyone with the slightest imagination doubt what will follow, as nature (and human nature) takes its course?

First, the repositories will facilitate sending reprints to those who request a single copy for research purposes, with one click each. Sending reprints is not OA; researchers have been doing it for a half century. But they used to have to do it by reading Current Contents or scanning journals' contents lists, mailing reprint requests, and then waiting and hoping that authors would take the time and trouble and expense to mail them a reprint, as requested (and many did). But now the whole transaction is just one click each, and almost immediate, if the papers have been deposited and both parties are at the wheel.

But that's still just Almost-OA. Once immediate-deposit is mandated, however, about 60% of those deposits can be made immediately OA, because about 60% of journals already endorse immediate, unembargoed Green OA. (RCUK has already succeeded is dragging down that figure to somewhat closer to 50/50 with its perverse preference for Gold, inspiring hybrid Gold publishers to offer Gold and increase Green embargo lengths to try to force UK authors to pick paid Gold over cost-free Green).

Now that's about half immediate-OA plus half Almost-OA to tide over researcher needs during the embargo. But does anyone have any doubt about what will happen next? As OA and Almost-OA grow, and the research community tastes more and more of what it's like to have half immediate-OA and half Almost-OA, all the disciplines that have not yet had the sense to do it will begin to do what almost 100% of physicists have already been doing for 20 years now without so much as a moment's hesitation or a "by your leave":

That last remaining keystroke, once a paper is written, revised, accepted and deposited -- the keystroke that makes the paper OA -- will be done sooner and sooner, more and more, until the embargoes with which publishers are trying to hold research hostage will all die their natural and well-deserved deaths as the research community learns to do the obvious, optimal and inevitable, in the online era.

(Nor will peer-reviewed journal publishing die, as publishers keep warning menacingly: It will simply convert to Gold OA -- but only after the pressure from Green OA has forced journals to phase out all obsolete products and services and their costs: that means phasing out the print version and the online version, and offloading all access-providing and archiving onto the global network of Green OA institutional repositories. Then, instead of double-paying for Gold OA, as Finch folly and RCUK recklessness would have us do -- subscriptions plus Gold OA fees -- post-Green Gold OA will just be a fee for the peer review service, at a fair, affordable and sustainable price, paid for out of a fraction of institutions' annual savings from subscription cancellations instead of out of scarce research funds, over and above subscriptions, as now. Pre-Green Gold is Fool's Gold: Post-Green Gold is Fair Gold.)

Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate

Executive Summary: The proposed HEFCE/REF Open Access [OA] mandate -- that in order to be eligible for REF, the peer-reviewed final draft of all journal articles must be deposited in the authors institutional repository immediately upon publication, with embargoes applicable only to the date at which the article must be made OA – is excellent, and provides exactly the sort of complement required by the RCUK OA mandate. It ensures that authors deposit immediately and institutionally and it recruits their institutions to monitor and ensure compliance.
      For journal articles, no individual or disciplinary exceptions or exemptions to the immediate-deposit are needed, but embargo length can be adapted to the discipline or even to exceptional individual cases.
      Embargo length is even more important for open data, and should be carefully and flexibly adapted to the needs not only of disciplines and individuals, but of each individual research project.
      Requiring monograph OA if the author does not wish to provide it is not reasonable, but perhaps many or most monograph authors would not mind depositing their texts as Closed Access.

we propose to accept material published via either gold or green routes as eligible, recognising that it is not appropriate to express any preference in the context of research assessment

Excellent. This is the optimal OA policy and is completely compatible with the OA policies being adopted worldwide. Note, though, that gold and green are not both publishing routes. They are both routes to providing OA, but only gold is a publishing route. The green route is to publish in any journal at all, and to provide OA to that publication by depositing it in an OA repository. So for clearer wording I would suggest: we propose to accept as eligible published material that has been made Open Access via either gold or green routes, recognising that it is not appropriate to express any preference in the context of research assessment. It is already implicit in the proposed HEFCE/REF OA policy, but suggest that it is make explicit that (the final peer-reviewed draft of) articles must be deposited in the authors institutional repository immediately upon publication, irrespective of whether the author chooses the gold or the green route.

We propose to treat as open access publications those which meet all of the following criteria:

deposited in the author's own institutional immediately upon publication,

although the repository may provide access in a way that respects agreed embargos

made available as the final peer reviewed text, though not necessarily identical to the publishers edited and formatted version;

and presented in a form allowing the reader to search for and re-use content (including by download and for text-mining) both manually and using automated tools, provided such re-use is subject to proper attribution under appropriate licensing

Excellent. I suggest that it be made clear that the re-use might only be after any allowable publisher embargo has elapsed. (I also suggest specifying that the re-use rights may exclude re-publication rights by rival free-riding publishers, otherwise this condition may induce publishers that have no embargo to adopt an embargo.)

We intend that work which has been originally published in an ineligible form then retrospectively made available in time for the post-2014 REF submission date should not be eligible, as the primary objective of this proposal is to stimulate immediate open-access publication.

Excellent. This is precisely the condition that is needed to ensure that deposit is immediate and not delayed, and to ensure that the authors institutions are recruited to monitor and ensure that deposit is immediate and not delayed. It is especially useful because its effects go far beyond the 4 papers that authors will ultimately submit to REF: The choice of the 4 papers to submit is not usually made until the end of the REF interval, just before the next REF. So, in the meanwhile, this policy makes it necessary that all potentially eligible papers are deposited immediately upon publication, whether or not they are ultimately submitted. This will go a long way toward ensuring that all UK research output is deposited immediately. (Special congratulations to HEFCE/REF for this especially effective clause!)

The role of institutional repositoriesAs part of our commitment to increasing public access, we intend to require that outputs meeting the REF open access requirement (whether published by the gold or green route) shall be accessible through an institutional repository.

Excellent. But one small suggestion: (whether made open access by the gold or green route) As earlier, this is to distinguish publishing from access-provision. All submitted outputs covered by our requirement for open access above, and other submitted outputs that are available electronically, shall be available through a repository of the submitting institution.

This would mean in practice that each submitting institution would maintain a web facility through which all relevant outputs might be identified and accessed (including items available through a link to another website).

Excellent. Exactly the policy needed. And of course just about all UK institutions already have these repositories. What they lacked was a mandate that would fill them, and empower them to ensure that they are filled. This is precisely what the HEFCE/REF OA policy provides for the UK, and as a model for the rest of the world.

We welcome further advice on repository use and on techniques for institutional repositories to cross-refer to subject and other repositories.

Institutional repositories need to be OAI-compliant and interoperable, so that subject and other repositories can harvest their metadata for central cross-repository search.

Institutional repositories should also implement the SWORD protocol for importing/exporting contents to/from institutional and central repositories, such as Arxiv, UKPMC or EuroPMC. Repositories should also configure their data to make them maximally visible, discoverable, harvestable and hence searchable through Google Scholar and other major search engines. (I dont think the function you mean here is to cross-refer: its interoperability, harvestability, importability, exportability, and rich metadata. As the repositories begin filling in a serious way, these functionalities will be developed and made even more powerful than is currently envisioned.)

Embargoes and licences

Some publishers introduce embargo periods before work can be made available in an open-access form. Where embargoes apply we propose to determine eligible periods with regard to the practice of other major research funders at the time. Outputs will be eligible if they are still under an acceptable embargo at the REF submission date

Exactly the right strategy: Separate deposit mandate (immediate, no exceptions) from the date at which the deposit must be made OA (allowable embargo length to be decided discipline by discipline).

While we expect that sufficient clarity and reassurance on embargoes and licences will be achieved through the Research Council discussions, we welcome responses which address these issues.

The crucial thing is to separate the immediate-deposit requirement from the question of embargo length or nature of license.

Exceptions

Ideally we would like to see all outputs that are submitted for research assessment published in a form which meet the criteria. However, we recognise that there may be some exceptions during this transitional period.

We have considered three possible ways of handling exceptions:

a. Identifying categories of material which we think may be exempt from the open access requirement described above (paragraph 11). We would give careful consideration to reasoned suggestions for sub-categories of material that should be exempt.

b. Allowing individual outputs to be exempt from the requirement on a case-by-case basis, based on guidelines.

c. Specifying that a given percentage (for example, 80 per cent) of all outputs submitted by an institution meet the requirement.

Books and data can be handled differently from journal articles, because the case for (and timing of) OA for books and for data is very different. But on no account should any exceptions be allowed for the immediate-deposit requirement for journal articles. Special treatment or exceptions should only pertain to the embargo length (i.e., the date at which the deposit is made OA). And on no account should the immediate-deposit requirement be applied only on a percentage basis. Immediate-deposit should be 100%. Embargo-lengths and rights/licenses can be adapted to disciplines or special individual cases.

Some have asked that particular disciplinary groups should be exempt from this requirement, but we consider that research in all subjects has equal importance and therefore equally merits receiving the benefits of open-access publication. As with other aspects of the REF we expect the details relating to exemptions to be sympathetic to particular disciplinary issues; but in this instance we consider it will be most appropriate to identify which types of output should be exempt, looking across all disciplines, and we welcome advice on this.

Again, exemptions and exceptions based on disciplines should only be considered for OA embargo length and for further rights licensing, over and above free online access (and of course for books, data, and other special content other than journal articles). But not for journal article deposit date, which must be immediate.

Taking account of publication timescales and that the start of the next REF period is 1st January 2014, it may be that some notice is needed before these requirements apply. We propose to set a date which provides reasonable notice. Outputs published before that date will be automatically exempt from these requirements. We welcome advice on an appropriate notice period, taking account of the publications cycle.

If the HEFCE/REF mandate is adopted soon, there is no reason at all why 1 January 2014 cannot be the start-date for the immediate-deposit requirement (for journal articles).

(If a researchers institution does not yet have a repository, there is OpenDepot, created precisely for that purpose and still patiently awaiting mandates in order to put its resources to use!)

Monograph publications

No pressing issues with books: No harm would be done if monographs too had to be deposited immediately, but with no requirement to make them open access neither immediately, nor ever, unless the author wishes.

(As green OA for articles grows, more and more monograph authors will want the benefits of OA too, in terms of increased usage and impact.)

Open data

We invite comment on whether respondents feel this is the appropriate approach or whether they feel that sufficient progress has in fact been made to implement a requirement for open data as well. We will consider any representations that such a requirement may reasonably now be developed but would also need advice on how this might be achieved.

There are special complications with data that do not exist at all for journal articles (or even for books): Researchers are researchers, not mere data-gatherers. They gather data in order to use, data-mine and analyze it. If they are forced to make their data OA for use by one and all immediately, then there is a Prisoners Dilemma: Its much better for me if I dont take the time or trouble (nor spend the time seeking the funding) to gather the data myself: Just let someone else do the work, and then I can help myself to the data immediately, because it is mandated! In other words, embargoes are a much more serious matter in the case of data than in the case of journal articles.

Journal article embargoes are merely ways of allowing publishers to ensure their current revenue streams and modus operandi instead of letting research and researchers derive the full benefits of the web era. (It is not clear that that is good for anyone but the publishers). But with research data not only is the existence and length of an exclusive 1st-expoitation right for the data-gatherer fair and important, but the length of the fair embargo period will vary substantially from project to project, not just from discipline to discipline.

On "Diamond OA," "Platinum OA," "Titanium OA," and "Overlay-Journal OA," Again

1. Green/Subscription Co-Existence. Subscriptions might co-exist peacefully with Green OA for some time, even after the world has reached 100% Green.

(As long as mandatory Green OA generates 100% Green OA, this is no problem for OA, and it certainly does ease the hardship of the serials crisis, since with 100% Green, subscriptions become a luxury rather than a painful necessity, as they are now.)

2. The Green/Gold Distinction.The definition of Green and Gold OA is that Green OA is provided by the author and Gold OA is provided by the journal. This makes no reference to journal cost-recovery model. Although most of the top Gold OA journals charge APCs and are not subscription based, the majority of Gold OA journals do not charge APCs (as Peter Suber and others frequently point out).

These Gold OA journals may cover their costs in one of several ways:

(i) Gold OA journals may simply be subscription journals that make their online version OA
(ii) Gold OA journals may be subsidized journals
(iii) Gold OA journals may be volunteer journals where all parties contribute their resources and services gratis
(iv) Gold OA journals may be hybrid subscription/Gold journals that continue to charge subscriptions for non-OA articles but offer the Gold option for an APC by the individual OA article.

All of these are Gold OA (or hybrid) journals.

It would perhaps be feasible to estimate the costs of each kind. But I think it would be a big mistake, and a source of great confusion, if one of these kinds (say, ii, or iii) were dubbed "Platinum."

That would either mean that it was both Gold and Platinum, or it would restrict the meaning of Gold to (i) and (iv), which would redefine terms in wide use for almost a decade now in terms of publication economics rather than in terms of the way they provide OA, as they had been.

(And in that case we would need many more "colours," one for each of (i) - (iv) and any other future cost-recovery model someone proposes (advertising?) -- and then perhaps also different colors for Green (institutional repository deposit, central deposit, home-page deposit, immediate deposit, delayed deposit, OAI-compliant, author-deposited, librarian-deposited, provost-deposited, 3rd-party-deposited, crowd-sourced, e.g. via Mendeley, which some have proposed calling this "Titanium OA").

I don't think this particoloured nomenclature would serve any purpose other than confusion. Green and Gold designate the means by which the OA is provided -- by the author or by the journal. The journal's cost-recovery model is another matter, and should not be colour-coded lest it obscure this fundamental distinction. Ditto for the deposit's locus and manner.

3. "Overlay Journals." I have a longstanding problem with the term "overlay journal" that I have rehearsed before. Overlay of what on what?

The notion of an "overlay journal" was first floated by Ginsparg for Arxiv. Arxiv contains authors' unrefereed, unpublished preprints and then their refereed, published postprints. Ginsparg said that eventually journals could turn into "overlays" on the Arxiv deposits, corresponding roughly to the transition from preprint to postprint. The "overlay" would consist of the peer review, revision, and then the journal title as the "tag" certifying the officially accepted version.

But in that sense, all Gold OA journals are "overlay journals" once they have phased out their print edition:

The "overlay" of the peer review service and then the tagging of the officially accepted version could be over a central repository, over distributed institutional repositories, or over the publsher's (OA) website.

Even a non-OA subscription journal would be an "overlay" journal if it had phased out its print edition: The peer review and certification tag would simply be an "overlay" on an online version, regardless of where it was located, and even regardless of whether it was OA or non-OA. (Once we get this far, we see that even for print journals the peer review and certification is just an "overlay").

What I think this reveals is that in the online era (and especially the OA era) the notion of "overlay" is completely redundant: Once we note that the print edition was just a technical detail of the Gutenberg era, we realize that journal publishing consists (and always implicitly consisted) of two components: access-provision and quality-control/certification (peer-review/editing). The latter is always an "overlay" on the former. And once the print edition is gone, it's an overlay on a digital template that can be here, there or everywhere. It is simply a tagged digital file.

Now my own oft-repeated scenario is that universally mandated Green OA self-archiving will eventually lead to journals abandoning their print versions, then abandoning their digital versions and offloading all access-provision and archiving of the digital version onto the global network of Green OA repositories.

This is, in a sense, an "overlay" scenario. But a much simpler and more natural way of looking at it is that from the multiple functions that journals formerly performed, and the multiple co-bundled products and services they formerly sold via subscription -- print edition, online edition, distribution, storage and peer review/editing -- Green OA will induce a down-sizing to the sole remaining essential function for a peer-reviewed journal in the networked online medium: peer review.

Peer review is hence an unbundled service provided by a post-Green Gold OA journal. I don't think it is realistic to try to assess its costs independently, as a form of journal publication "overlaid" on something or other -- independent of what that something or other is, and how it gets there!

So although it is likely that 100% Green will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable and force a transition to Gold, there may be a long co-existence interregnum in between. (And the main unpredicatable factor determining that will be author/reader habits, including how long they will want to keep paying for print, and how much and how long they value the publisher's version-of-record.)

That's why it is far less important how long 100% Green will co-exist with subscriptions than how long it will take to get to 100% Green (and what's the fastest and surest way to get us there?)!

Berners-Lee, Tim, De Roure, Dave, Harnad, Stevan and Shadbolt, Nigel (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Institutional Repository "Business Model" for Open Access Publishing?

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)

HEFCE/REF Proposed Mandate Can Ensure RCUK Mandate Compliance

RCUK has now made it clear that authors are free to choose Green or Gold.

That means authors no longer have to switch journals or pay for Gold if they do not wish to.

But RCUK has done nothing to implement a compliance monitoring and verification mechanism for Green: Quite the opposite. RCUK has simply turned the entire Green option into an unmonitored, unverified, open-ended delay of 24 months or more. (The only compliance monitoring proposed so far concerns how institutions spend the Gold funds!)

But the proposed new HEFCE/REF mandate has offered the remedy:

To be eligible for REF, all articles need to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication (regardless of whether the journal is subscription or Gold, and regardless of whether the deposit is embargoed or unembargoed).

This (by recruiting UK institutions in monitoring and ensuring immediate deposit) will repair the glaring gap in the RCUK mandate.

And with the help of the institutional repositories' faciltated "request copy" Button, immediate-deposit will also tide over researcher access needs during any embargo as delayed deposit could not have done.

The only remaining perverse effect of the RCUK mandate is the obvious incentive it gives to subscription publishers (including those publishers who currently endorse immediate, unembargoed Green OA) to instead offer hybrid Gold and adopt and extend a Green OA embargo beyond the RCUK limit to increase the pressure on UK authors to pick and pay for the hybrid Gold option.

But since the RCUK is not even bothering to monitor author compliance with its increasingly open-ended embargo limits, if the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit mandate is adopted, this potential perverse effect of the RCUK mandate is somewhat reduced (though still not zero). Yet perhaps the reduced uptake of the UK Gold option, now that it is clarified that authors are free to choose -- along with the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit requirement irrespective of Gold or embargoes -- will make the damage from the RCUK policy on international Green OA mandates negligible.