Open Access Archivangelism

Nat Gustafson-Sundell wrote:

NGS: "I don't expect local repositories to ever offer quality control."

Of course not. They are merely offering a locus for authors to provide free access to their preprint drafts before submitting them to journals for peer review, and to their final drafts (postprints) after they have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by a journal.

Individual institutions cannot peer-review their own research output (that would be in-house vanity-publishing).

And global repositories like arxiv or pubmedcentral or citeseerx or google scholar cannot assume the peer-review functions of the thousands and thousands of journals that are actually doing the peer- review today. That would add billions to their costs (making each into one monstrous (generic?) megajournal: near impossible, practically, if it weren't also totally unnecessary -- and irrelevant to OA and its costs).

NGS: "Also, users have said again and again that they prefer discovery by subject, which will be possible for semantic docs in local repositories or better indexes (probably built through better collaborations), but not now."

Search should of course be central and subject-tagged, over a harvested central collection from the distributed local IRs, not local, IR by IR.

(My point was that central deposit is no longer necessary nor desirable, either for content-provision or for search. The optimal system is institutional deposit (mandated by institutions as well as funders) and then central harvesting for search.

NGS: "I agree that it would be great if local repositories were more used, and eventually, the systems will be in place to make it possible, but every study I've seen still shows local repository use to remain disappointingly low, although some universities are doing better than others."

"Use" is ambiguous, as it can refer both to author use (for deposit) and user use (for search and retrieval). We agree that the latter makes no sense: users search at the harvester level, not the IR level.

But for the former (low author "use," i.e., low levels of deposit), the solution is already known: Unmandated IRs (i.e., most of the existing c. 1500 IRs) are near empty (of OA's target content, which is preprints and postprints of peer-reviewed journal articles) whereas mandated IRs (c. 150, i.e.m 1%!) are capturing (or on the way to capturing) their full annual postprint output.

So the solution is mandates. And the locus of deposit for both institutional and funder mandates should be institutional, not central, so the two kinds of mandates converge rather than compete (requiring multiple deposit of the same paper).

For the special case of arxiv, with its long history of unmandated deposit, a university's IR could import its own remote arxiv deposits (or export its local deposits to arxiv) with software like SWORD, but eventually it is clear that institution-external deposit makes no sense:

Institutions are the universal providers of all peer-reviewed research, funded and unfunded, across all fields. One-stop/one-step local deposit (followed by automatic import. export. and harvesting to/ from whatever central services are needed) is the only sensible, scaleable and sustainable system, and also the one that is most conducive to the growth of universal OA deposit mandates from institutions, reinforced by funder mandates likewise requiring institutional deposit, rather than discouraged by gratuitously requiring institution-external deposit.

NGS: "Inter-institutional repositories by subject area (however broadly defined) simply work better, such as arXiv or even the Princeton-Stanford repository for working papers in the classics."

"Work better" for what? Deposit or search? You are conflating the locus of search (which should, of course, be cross-institutional) with the locus of deposit, which should be institutional, in order to accelerate institutional deposit mandates and in order to prevent discouraging adoption and compliance because of the prospect of having to deposit the same paper in more than one place.

(Yes, automatic import/export/harvesting software is indifferent to whether it is transferring from local IRs to central CRs or from central CRs to local IRs, but the logistics and pragmatics of deposit and deposit mandates -- since the institution is always the source of the content -- make it obvious that one-time deposit institutionally fits all output, systematically and tractably, whereas willy-nilly IR/CR deposit, depending on fields' prior deposit habits or funder preferences is a recipe for many more years of the confusion, inaction, absence of mandates, and near-absence of OA content that we have now.)

NGS: "Currently, universities are paying external middlemen an outsized fee for validation and packaging services. These services can and should be brought "in-house" (at least as an ideal/ goal to develop toward whenever the opportunities can be seized) except in cases where prices align with value, which occurs still with some society and commercial publications."

I completely agree that along with hosting their own peer-reviewed research output, and mandating its deposit in their own IRs, institutions can also use their IRs (along with specially developed software for this purpose) to showcase, manage, monitor, and measure their own research output. That is what OA metrics (local and global) will make possible.

But not till the problem of getting the content into OA IRs is solved. And the solution is institutional and funder mandates -- for institutional (not institution-external) deposit.

NGS: "To the extent that an arXiv or the inter-institutional repository for humanities research which will be showing up in 3-7 years moves toward offering these services, they are clearly preferable to old fashioned subscription models (since the financial support is for actual services) and current local repositories which do not offer everything needed in the value chain (as listed in Van de Sompel et al. 2004)."

(1) The reason 99% of IRs offer no value is that 99% of IRs are at least 85% empty. Only the 1% that are mandated are providing the full institutional OA content -- funded and unfunded, across all disciplines -- that all this depends on.

(2) The central collections, as noted, are indispensable for the services they provide, but that does not include locus of deposit and hosting: There, central deposit is counterproductive, a disservice.

(3) With local hosting of all their research output, plus central harvesting services, institutions can get all they need by way of search and metrics, partly through local statistics, partly from central ones.

NGS: " I remember when I first read an article quoting a researcher in an arXiv covered field who essentially said that journals in his field were just for vanity and advancement, since all the "action" was in arXiv (Ober et al. 2007 quoting Manuel 2001 quoting McGinty 1999) -- now think about the value of a repository that doesn't just store content and offer access."

This familiar slogan, often voiced by longstanding arxiv users, that "Journals are obsolete: They're only for tenure committees. We [researchers] only use the arxiv" is as false, empirically, as it is incoherent, logically: It is just another instance of the "Simon Says" phenomenon: (Pay attention to what Simon actually does, not to what he says.)

Although it is perfectly true that most arxiv users don't bother to consult journals any more -- using the OA version in arxiv only, and referring to the journal's canonical version-of-record only in citing -- it is equally (and far more relevantly) true that they all continue to submit all those papers to peer-reviewed journals, and to revise them according to the feedback from the referees, until they are accepted and published.

That is precisely the same thing that all other researchers are doing, including the vast majority that do not self-archive their peer-reviewed postprints (or, even more rarely, their unrefereed preprints) at all.

So journals are not just for vanity and advancement; they are for peer review. And arxiv users are just as dependent on that as all other researchers. (No one has ever done the experiment of trying to base all research usage on nothing but unrefereed preprints and spontaneous user feedback.)

So the only thing that is true in what "Simon says" is that when all papers are available, OA, as peer-reviewed final drafts (and sometimes also supplemented earlier by the prerefereeing drafts) there is no longer any need for users or authors to consult the journal's proprietary version of record. (They can just cite it, sight unseen.)

But what follows from that is that journals will eventually have to scale down to becoming just peer-review service-providers and certifiers (rather than continuing also to be access-providers or document producers, either on-paper or online).

Nothing follows from that about the value of repositories, except that they are useless if they do not contain the target content (at least after peer review, and, where possible and desired by authors, also before peer review).

Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.

NGS: "Do I think the financial backing will remain in place? It depends on the services actually offered and to what extent subject repositories could replace a patchwork system of single titles offered by a patchwork of publishers."

At the moment the issue is whether arxiv, such as it is (a central locus for institution-external deposit of institutional research content in some fields, mostly physics, plus a search and alerting service), can be sustained by voluntary sub-sidy/scription -- not whether, if arxiv also somehow "took over" the function of journals (peer review), that too could be paid for by voluntary sub-sidy/ scription...

NGS: "Universities could save a great deal by refusing to pay the same overhead over and over again to maintain complete collections in single subject areas (not to mention paying for other people's profits)."

I can't quite follow this: You mean universities can cancel journal subscriptions? How do those universities' users then get access to those cancelled journals' contents, unless they are all being systematically made OA? Apart from those areas of physics where it has already been happening since 1991, that isn't going to happen in most other fields till OA is mandated by the universal providers of that content, the universities (reinforced by mandates from their funders).

Then (but only then) can universities cancel their journal subscriptions and use (part of) their windfall saving to pay (journals!) for the peer-review of their own research output, article by article (instead of buying in other universities' output, journal by journal).

NGS: "More importantly, more could be done to make articles useful and discoverable in a collaborative environment, from metadata to preservation, so that the value chain is extended and improved (my sci-fi includes semantic docs, not just cataloged texts, and improved, or multi-stage, peer review, or peer review on top of a working papers repository)."

All fine, and desirable -- but not until all the OA content is being provided, and (outside of physics), it isn't being provided -- except when mandated...

So let's not build castles in Spain before we have their contents safely in hand.

NGS: "I think there's been plenty of 'chatter' to indicate that the basic assumptions in conversations between universities are changing (see recent conference agendas), so that we can expect to see more and more practical plans to collaborate on metadata, preservation, and , yes, publications."

I'll believe the "chatter" when it has been cashed into action (deposit mandates). Till then it's just distraction and time-wasting.

NGS: "My head spins to think of the amount of money to be saved on the development of more shared platforms, although, the money will only be saved if other expenditures are slowly turned off."

All this talk about money, while the target content -- which could be provided at no cost -- is still not being provided (or mandated)...

NGS: "Sandy mentioned in another post that she [he] would hope for arXiv like support for university monographs..."

Monographs (not even a clearcut case, like peer-reviewed articles, which are all, already, author give-aways, written only for usage and impact) are moot, while not even peer-reviewed articles are being deposited, or mandated...

NGS: "Open access and NFP publications which do offer the full value chain have been proven to have much lower production costs per page than FP publishers and they do not suffer any impact disadvantages -- and these are still operated on a largely stand-alone basis, without the advantages that can be gained by sharing overhead."

Cash castles in Spain again, while the free content is not yet being provided or mandated...

NGS: "Maybe local repositories really are the way to go, since then each institution has more control over its own contribution, but the collaboration and the support will still need to occur to support discovery (implying metadata, both in production and development of standards and tools) and preservation."

No, search and preservation are not the problem: content is.

NGS: "I suppose another problem with local repositories, however, is that a consensus is far less likely to unite around local repositories as a practical option at this juncture -- the case can't just be made with words, you need the numbers and arXiv has them -- and while I am interested to see strong local repositories emerge, there is greater sense in supporting what can be achieved, since we need more steps in the right direction."

"The numbers" say the following:

Physicists have been depositing their preprints and postprints spontaneously (unmandated) in arxiv since 1991, but in the ensuing 20 years this commendable practice has not been taken up by other disciplines. The numbers, in other words, are static, and stagnant. The only cases in which they have grown are those where deposit was mandated (by institutions and funders).

And for that, it no longer makes sense (indeed it goes contrary to sense) to deposit them institutional-externally, instead of mandating institutional deposit and then harvesting centrally.

And the virtue of that is that it distributes the costs of managing deposits sustainably, by offloading them onto each institution, for its own output, instead of depending on voluntary institutional sub-sidy/scription for obsolete and unnecessary central deposit.

(See also the "denominator fallacy," which arises when you compare the size of size of central repositories with the size of institutional repositories: The world's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals publish about 2.5 million articles annually, across all fields. A repository's success rate is the proportion of its annual target contents that are being deposited annually. For an institution, the denominator is its own total annual peer-reviewed journal article output across all fields. For a central repository, it is the total annual article output -- in the field(s) it covers -- from all the institutions in the world. Of course the central repository's numerator is greater than any single institutional repository's numerator. But its denominator is far greater still. Arxiv has famously been doing extremely well for certain areas of physics, unmandated, for two decades. But in other areas arxiv is not not doing so well, relative to the field's true denominator; and most other central repositories are likewise not doing well, In fact, it is pretty certain that -- apart from physics, with its 2-decade tradition of deposit, plus a few other fields such as economics (preprints) and computer science -- unmandated central repositories are doing exactly as badly unmandated institutional repositories are doing, namely, about 15%.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Professor Steven Hyman, Provost of Harvard, the first US University to mandate Open Access, has submitted such a spot-on, point for point response to President Obama’s Request for Information on Public Access Policy that if his words are heeded, the beneficiaries will not only be US research progress and the US tax-paying public, by whom US research is funded and for whose benefit it is conducted, but research progress and its public benefits planet-wide, as US policy is globally reciprocated.

Reproduced below are just a few of the highlights of Professor Hyman’s response. Every one of the highlights has a special salience, and attests to the minute attention and keen insight into the subtle details of Open Access that went into the preparation of this invaluable set of recommendations.

[Hash-marks (#) indicate three extremely minor points on which the response could be ever so slightly clarified -- see end.]

“The public access policy should (1) be mandatory, not voluntary, (2) use the shortest practical embargo period, no longer than six months, (3) apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, as opposed to the published version, unless the publisher consents to provide public access to the published version, (4) [# require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository #] immediately upon acceptance for publication, where it would remain “dark” until the embargo period expired, and (5) avoid copyright problems by [## requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on federally funded research, to retain the right to give the relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript ##]…

“If publishers believe they cannot afford to allow copies of their articles to be released under a public-access policy, they need not publish federally funded researchers. To date, however, it appears that no publishers have made that decision in response to the NIH policy. Hence, federally funded authors remain free to submit their work to the journals of their choice. Moreover, public access gives authors a much larger audience and much greater impact…

“If the United States extends a public-access mandate across the federal government, then lay citizens with no interest in reading this literature for themselves will benefit indirectly because researchers will benefit directly…. That is the primary problem for which public access is the solution…

“It doesn’t matter whether many lay readers, or few, are able to read peer-reviewed research literature or have reason to do so. But even if there are many, the primary beneficiaries of a public-access policy will be professional researchers, who constitute the intended audience for this literature and who depend on access to it for their own work….

“Among the metrics for measuring success, I can propose these: the compliance rate (how many articles that the policy intends to open up have actually been opened up); the number of downloads from the public-access repositories; and the number of citations to the public-access articles. As we use different metrics, we must accept that [### we will never have an adequate control group: a set of articles on similar topics, of similar quality, for which there is no public access ###]….

---

Three suggestions for clarifying the minor points indicated by the hash-marks (#):

[#”require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository” #]

(add: “preferably the fundee’s own institutional repository”)

[##”requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on federally funded research, to retain the right to give the relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript” ##]

(add: “the rights retention and license are desirable and welcome, but not necessary if the publisher already endorses making the deposit publicly accessible immediately, or after the allowable embargo period”)

[### "we will never have an adequate control group [for measuring the mandate's success]: a set of articles on similar topics, of similar quality, for which there is no public access" ###]

(add: “but closed-access articles published in the same journal and year as mandatorily open-access articles do provide an approximate matched control baseline for comparison”)


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Matthew Cockerill [MC] (BioMedCentral) wrote:

MC: "Agreement on terminology can really only ever be pragmatic"

Agreed.

MC: "Many of us use "open access" to mean what Stevan refers to as 'libre open access', and have distinguished this from "free access" which Stevan refers to as 'Gratis open access'."

This is alas all true too.

It is also true that "many of us" (not me!) use "open access" to mean "gold open access" (publishing) only.

And the progress of open access is likewise much the worse off -- pragmatically-- because of this other widespread conflation (sometimes willful, mostly just ignorant) too.

---

[(1) Self-Archiving FAQ #31 "Waiting for Gold" (2) Stevan Harnad, "Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis," #15 and (3) Peter Suber "Field Guide to misunderstandings about open access" Misunderstanding #1: "All OA is gold OA" and its flip-side: Misunderstanding #22 "All OA is gratis OA." "The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin definitions of OA all describe forms of libre OA. However, there are good reasons to recognize gratis OA as a kind of OA... The current misunderstanding accepts that gratis OA is a kind of OA, but goes one step too far and assumes that gratis OA is the only kind of OA..." ]

---

It is also true that what Stevan (and Peter, let's not forget) -- co-coiners of the original (nonbinding, nonlegal) BOAI definition of "open access" -- refer to as "libre open access" was coined specifically to distinguish it from "gratis open access," which means free online access (whereas libre OA means free online access plus some re-use rights, not all yet specified).

But from the very outset, there has been some (understandable) motivation on the part of gold open access publishers to co-opt the term "open access" to fit their product, and only their product. See the long, sad, "Free Access vs. Open Access" debate, started by BioMedCental's first editorial "Free Access is not Open Access" in "Open Access Now" on 28 July 2003).

What is one to say, except that some of it sounds a lot like a battle over a trademark -- which you need, if you are conducting a trade...

But not just a battle over trademark. Also ideology vs. pragmatics. (I don't, by the way, think Matt's motivation, in particular, is primarily commercial: I am certain that he believes, very sincerely, in (libre) OA.)

My own motivation is exclusively to get all of the refereed literature freely accessible online, at long last, as soon as possible (it's already more than a decade and a half overdue), in whatever way works, is within reach, works surely, and works fast.

Hence the only thing at stake for me when it comes to the trademark "OA" is the fate of free online access itself, which will certainly come much later if -- now that the term "OA" and the "OA Movement" are launched in public consciousness -- it is now declared, for either commercial or ideological reasons, that OA mandates are no longer OA mandates but "FA" mandates, the OA impact advantage is no longer the OA advantage but the FA advantage, and those who have been fighting for OA since long before it got a name have not, in fact, been fighting for OA but "FA." Moreover, it means that precious little of the (already precious little) OA we have to date (about 15% green plus about 15% gold) is in reality OA at all: It's just "FA."

I find all this doubly foolish, not only because (1) gratis OA (free online access) is a necessary condition, though not a sufficient condition, for libre OA (free online access plus some re-use rights, not all yet specified) and will (as is evident to anyone who gives it a few minutes of serious thought) almost certainly lead to libre OA soon after it becomes universal (if and when we do what we need to do to make gratis OA universal) but also because (2) over-reaching and insisting on libre OA first, and deprecating gratis OA as not really being OA at all, merely FA, is merely serving to delay the onset of libre OA too (just as insisting that only Gold OA publishing is OA is delaying the era of Gold OA publishing).

So, yes, as Matt says, use of the terminology is just a matter of pragmatics, but not linguistic pragmatics: strategic pragmatics. And needlessly, counterproductively over-reaching for libre OA (or Gold OA) now, when Green gratis OA is fully within our grasp is just about as unpragmatic and short-sighted as one can possibly be, in the short (but already far too long) history of OA. And the attempt to co-opt the term exclusively is simply making the "best" the enemy of the better.

(I can already sense that there are those who are straining to chime in that their insistence on libre OA, too, is driven neither by commercial considerations nor ideology but pragmatics: they need the re-use rights, now, and their research progress is hurting for the lack of them. Let me suggest that if you look more closely at this "pragmatic" case for libre OA it almost always turns out to be about open data, not OA (which is about journal articles). Yet those who are in a hurry for open data are apparently happy to conflate their case with OA's, even if it's at the expense of again gratuitously handicapping our reach -- for the green gratis OA to journal articles that is within our grasp -- with the independent extra burden of data re-use rights. And what is invariably forgotten in all this special-case over-reaching is the completely correctable general case that has been staring us in the face, uncorrected, lo these 15+ years, which is that every day countless would-be users are being denied access and usage for the 85% of journal articles that are accessible only to those with subscription access. That is the paramount problem that the online era has empowered us to solve, and instead we are fussing about extra perks that will surely come soon after we solve it, but not if we continue to make those extra perks a precondition for a solution -- or even for naming the problem!)

MC: "I believe the reason that many, including BioMed Central, reserve the term open access for the 'libre' sense is not simply the historical precedent of BOAI and Bethesda, but also the wider related usage of the term open (as in open source, open courseware, open wetware, open government). In all cases, these imply the availability, reusability and redistributability of the material, not the fact that it doesn't cost anything."

And in all cases, as soon as one takes the trouble of looking closely at the apparent similarities, the profound differences reveal that this conflation of senses is specious and superficial: article texts are not program code that needs to be re-used and re-written; article texts are to be read and then the ideas and findings in them are to be re-used in new research and writings. Same for the disanalogy with open data, which of course includes "open wetware." Inasmuch as open courseware is just text, free online access for all is all that's needed. (Put the URL in the coursepack instead of the text.) Inasmuch as courseware is programs, it's the same disanalogy between text code and software code. Ditto for "open multimedia" and rip/remix/mashup: not for scholarly/scientific text -- though fine for the scholarly/scientific ideas and findings described in the text (modulo plagiarism). And "open government" is about combatting secrecy, which is moot for published scientific research (whether or not access carries a price tag).

"On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned"

"Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons"

In other words, I don't know about Peter, but it's certainly true that for my own part it was not because of all of these superficial and in the end specious commonalities supposedly shared by this panoply of "open" X's that I favored the term "open access" as the descriptor for what the online era had made possible for refereed scholarly/scientific journal articles.

On the contrary. If I had known in 2002 what confusion and conflation it would make "OA" heir to, I would have avoided the term "open" like the plague. (There was one commonality, though, that both Peter and I did intentionally try to capitalize on in our choice of that term: the "open" in the "open archives initiative" protocol for metadata harvesting. That harks back to an even earlier decision point, this time in an email exchange with Herb van de Sompel in 1999 about what how to rename the "Universal Preprint Service" and its "Santa Fe Convention," which had been the original names for the OAI and OAI protocol. It was Herb who opted for "open" rather than "free" (which I seem to recall that I preferred), so OAI became OAI, and OA/BOAI followed soon afterward (though OAI's "archive" was soon jettisoned -- again for no good reason whatsoever, just arbitrariness and pedantry -- in favor of"repository"... Lexicalization is notoriously capricious, and unintended metaphors and other affinities can come back to haunt you...)

MC: "On which basis, one might refer to Gratis open access, as being 'non-open open access'.  Which is why it seems to me a problematic form of terminology, however well-intentioned."

On the contrary, Matt. You are being so seduced by your incoming biases here that you don't realize that you are making them into self-fulfilling prophecies: Gratis OA is only "non-OA OA" to those who wish to argue that free online access is not open access!

Let me close with an abstract of the keynote I will be giving at the e-Democracy Conference in Austria in May.

In that talk I also will be discussing the commonalities and differences among the various "open" movements, but note only that "The problem [of Green Gratis OA] is not particularly an instance of "eDemocracy" one way or the other...":

MANDATES TO CHANGES RESEARCHERS' BEHAVIOR TOWARD PROVIDING OPEN ACCESS TO THEIR GIVE-AWAY RESEARCH

ABSTRACT: The primary target of the worldwide Open Access initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals in all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of these articles is an author give-away, written solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers, not for royalty income. The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already within reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped. The problem is not particularly an instance of "eDemocracy" one way or the other; it is an instance of inaction because of widespread misconceptions (reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox). The solution is for the world's research institutions and funders to extend their existing "publish or perish" mandates to require their employees and fundees to maximize access and impact for the research they are employed and funded to conduct by depositing it in their Open Access Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication to make it freely accessible to all its potential users webwide. Open Access metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Universities UK recommends making all the research outputs submitted to the UK's new Research Excellence Framework (REF) Open Access (OA).

The UUK's recommendation is of course very welcome and timely.

All research funded by the RCUK research councils is already covered by the fact that all the UK councils already mandate OA. It is this policy, already adopted by the UK, that the US is now also contemplating adopting, in the form of the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), as well as the discussion in President Obama's ongoing OSTP Public Access Policy Forum.

But if HEFCE were to follow the UUK's recommendation, it would help to ensure Open Access to UK research funded by the EU (for which OA is only partially mandated thus far) and other funders, as well as to unfunded research -- for which OA is mandated by a still small but growing number of universities in the UK and worldwide. (The same UUK proposal could of course be taken up by UK's universities, for once they mandate OA for all their research output, all UK research, funded and unfunded, becomes OA!)

There is an arbitrary constraint on REF submissions, however, which would greatly limit the scope of an OA requirement (as well as the scope of REF itself): Only four research outputs per researcher may be submitted, for a span covering at least four years, rather than all research output in that span.

This limitation arises because the REF retains the costly and time-consuming process of re-reviewing, by the REF peer panels, of all the already peer-reviewed research outputssubmitted. This was precisely what it had earlier been proposed to replace by metrics, if they prove sufficiently correlated with -- and hence predictive of -- the peer panel ranklings. Now it will only be partially supplemented by a few metrics.

This is a pity, and an opportunity lost, both for OA and for testing and validating a rich and diverse new battery of metrics and initializing their respective weights, discipline by discipline. Instead, UUK has endorsed a simplistic (and likewise untested and arbitrary) a-priori weighting ("60/20/20 for outputs, impact and environment").

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) Also in Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. (2007)

Today (Dec 10 2009) begins the comment period for President Obama's OSTP Public Forum on How Best to Make Federally Funded Research Results Available For Free. Comments will be in three phases:

Implementation (Dec. 10 to 20): Which Federal agencies are good candidates to adopt Public Access policies? What variables (field of science, proportion of research funded by public or private entities, etc.) should affect how public access is implemented at various agencies, including the maximum length of time between publication and public release?

Features and Technology (Dec. 21 to Dec 31): In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information, and to make it easy for others to link to it? Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximize public benefit? How are these anticipated to change.

Management (Jan. 1 to Jan. 7): What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? What would be the best metrics of success? What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international)? Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

Please do comment at the OSTP site (you'll need to register first).

My own comments follow:

It would be a great benefit to research progress in the US as well as worldwide if the US were to require not only NIH-funded research journal articles to be made freely accessible to all users online, but all federally funded research journal articles.

BENEFITS: The benefits of making all US publicly funded research publicly accessible online would not only be in the fact that all tax-payers (and not just those who can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published) will be able to read and use the research their taxes paid for, but, even more important, it will allow all researchers (and not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published) to read, use, apply and build upon all those research findings, again to the benefit of the public that funded them, and for the future research advances for the sake of which research is funded, conducted and published.

WHICH RESEARCH? Which federally funded research should be made publicly accessible online? Start with all research that is fully funded federally, in all scientific, technical and scholarly fields, and then work out agreements in the case of joint private funding. Most private funders will likewise want to ensure maximal usage and impact for the research they have funded. If they want it published at all, they will also want access to it to be maximized.

TIMING OF DEPOSIT: Allowable embargo time should be minimal, but, far more important, the requirement should be to deposit the final, peer-reviewed draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the author's institutional repository, without exception. 63% of journals already endorse making the deposit Open Access immediately. For the remaining 37%, the deposit can be made Closed Access, with only its metadata (authors, date, title, journal, abstract) accessible publicly during the allowable embargo. That way researchers can send the author a semi-automatic email eprint request for an individual copy to be used for research purposes. This will tide over research needs during any embargo.

LOCUS OF DEPOSIT: It is extremely important to require institutional instead of central deposit (which is what several funders require now, e.g., NIH requires central deposit in PubMedCentral, PMC). Institutional deposits can be easily and automatically harvested or imported into central collections and services like PMC (or Scirus or OAIster or Citeseer, or, for that matter, Google Scholar and Google).

The NIH requirement to deposit in PubMedCentral (PMC) is an extremely counterproductive handicap, needlessly slowing down the growth of public access for no good reason at all. Institutions (universities and research institutes) are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, across all fields. If funders mandate institutional deposit, they encourage and reinforce universalizing the adoption of institutional public access mandates across all their fundees' institutions (and they gain a powerful ally in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the funder mandates).

But if funders instead require central deposit, they discourage and compete with universalizing the adoption and implementation of institutional public-access requirements. Nor is there any advantage whatsoever -- functional, technical or practical -- to requiring central rather than institutional deposit; it only creates needless obstacles to the universal adoption of public access and public access mandates for all research output. (It's rather like web hosts depositing their web pages directly in google, instead of hosting them locally and just letting google harvest them.)

WHO DEPOSITS? The current NIH public access policy allows the option of publishers doing the PMC deposits in place of NIH's fundees. This not only makes fundee compliance vaguer and compliance-monitoring more difficult, but it further locks in publisher embargoes (with less scope for authors providing individual access to researchers during the embargo) and it further discourages convergent institutional mandates (with the prospect of researchers having to do multiple deposit for the same paper, institution-internal and institution-external). The ones responsible for ensuring that the deposit is made, immediately upon acceptance for publication, are the fundee and the fundee's institution, by monitoring the deposits in their own institutional repository. Publishers should be out of the loop.

DEPOSIT WHAT? There is no need at all to be draconian about the format of the deposit. The important thing is that the full, peer-reviewed final draft should be deposited in the fundee's (OAI-compliant) institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. A preference can be expressed for XML format, but any format will do for now, until the practice of immediate Open Access deposit approaches global universality (at which time it will all converge on XML as a natural matter of course anyway).

It would be a needless handicap and deterrent to insist on any particular format today. (Doc or Docx will do, so will HTML or PDF or any of the open formats.) Don't complicate or discourage compliance by gratuitously insisting on more than necessary at the outset, and trust that as the practice of public access provision and usage grows, researchers will converge quite naturally on the optimal format. And remember that in the meanwhile the official published version will continue to be generated by publishers, purchased and stored by subscribing institutions, and preserved in deposit library archives. The public-access drafts are just supplements for the time being, not substitutes, deposited so that it is not only paying subscribers who can access and use federally funded research.)

MONITORING COMPLIANCE: What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? To require deposit in the fundee's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. Fundees' institutions are already co-responsible for compliance with funders' application and fulfillment conditions, and already only too eager to help. They should be made responsible for ensuring timely compliance with the funder's deposit requirement. It can also be made part of the grant requirement that the funder must be notified immediately upon deposit by being sent the deposit's URL, so it can be linked or imported for the funder's records and/or harvested by the funder's designated central repository (e.g. PMC).

METRICS OF SUCCESS: Institutions already have an interest in monitoring the usage and impact of their research output, and their institutional repositories already have means for generating usage metrics and statistics (e.g., IRStats). In addition there are now central means of measuring usage and impact (free services such as Citeseer, Citebase, Publish-or-Perish, Google Scholar and Google Books, as well as fee-based ones such as SCOPUS and Thompson-Reuters Web of Science). These and other rich new metrics will be available to measure success once the deposit requirements are adopted, growing, and supplying the content from which these rich new online metrics are extracted. Which of the new metrics proves to be the "best" remains to be tested by systematically assessing their predictive power and their correlation with peer evaluations.

COMMENT AND FEEDBACK: Once the research content is openly accessible online, many rich new tagging, commenting and feedback mechanisms will grow quite naturally on top of them (and can also be provided by central harvesters and services commissioned by the funders themselves, if they wish, or the metrics can simply be harvested from other services for the funder's subset of their content).

PRIVATE SECTOR USABILITY: Metrics will not only make it possible for deposit rates, downloads, citations, and newer metrics and their growth to be measured and monitored, but it will also be possible to sort uptake metrics into those based on public access and usage, researcher access and usage, and industrial R&D and applications access and usage. But the urgent priority is first to provide the publicly accessible research content on which all these uptake measures will be based. The measures will evolve quite naturally once the content is globally available.

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For more detailed guidelines on optimizing OA mandates (what to mandate depositing, where and when to mandate deposit, and how to integrate institutional and funder mandates), see 1, 2 & 3).

All federal agencies that fund scientific, technical and scholarly research should require fundees to make the resulting peer-reviewed articles to be made freely accessible online (”Open Access”).

There is no objective reason why any publicly funded research that is published in peer-revewed journals should be accessible only to subscribers.

The costs of providing free online access are minimal. Fundees should be required to make their articles publicly accessible by depositing them in their own institutions’ OAI-compliant Open Access Repository.

The deposit should be made immediately upon acceptance for publication. For the minority of publishers who do not yet endorse making the deposit Open Access immediately, an embargo of 6 months can be allowed during which only the deposit’s metadata are openly accessible but the author can provide individual eprints for researcher purposes in response to individual user email requests mediated by the institutional repository software.

All empirical data indicate that the optimal embargo is no embargo. If there is any access embargo at all, the result is needlessly lost research usage and impact. There is no field of science or scholarship, fast or slow, that benefits — or fails to lose — from denying access to peer-reviewed, published results once they have been accepted for publication.

The only version of a paper that needs to be made freely accessible to all users online is the author’s peer-reviewed final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication. There are no advantages at all to later versions of the paper, only disadvantages, because fewer publishers endorse making their proprietary PDF freely accessible. Eventually the author’s final draft can be in XML format, but for now any format (doc, docx, html, pdf, etc.) will do.

Only mandatory deposit is successful and effective. All other alternatives fail to generate deposits above the spontaneous unmandated level of about 15%. See Arthur Sale’s studies.

The only relevant structural characteristics of a public access policy are the ones already mentioned: mandate deposit of the fundee’s peer-reviewed final draft in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Preferable format, but not obligatory: XML.) Compliance should be monitored by the fundee’s institution, as part of the grant’s fulfillment condition. Maximum permissible embargo before making the deposit Open Access: 6 months (but preferably no embargo). Deposits can be harvested to central collections and services like PubMed Central, but deposit should be institutional and not central, in order to reinforce and facilitate complementary institutional mandates to deposit unfunded research.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Self-Archiving, Self-Vetting, "Overlay Journals" and "Disaggregated Models"':
Comments on 2002 SPARC Position Paper on Institutional Repositories by Raym Crow

(Note: These comments were originally posted on Sun Aug 04 2002)
The SPARC position paper, "The Case for Institutional Repositories," by Raym Crow (2002), is timely and will serve a useful purpose in mapping out for universities exactly why it is in their best interests to self-archive their research output, and how they should go about doing so.

I will only comment on a few passages, having mostly to do with the topic of "certification" (peer review) in which SPARC's message may have become a little garbled along the same lines that like-minded precursor initiatives (notably E-biomed and Scholar's Forum) have likewise been a little garbled: E-biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences

Scholars' Forum: A New Model For Scholarly Communication

To overview the point in question very briefly:

To provide open access (i.e., free, online, full-text access) to the research output of universities and research institutions worldwide -- output that is currently accessible only by paying access-tolls to the 24,000 peer reviewed journals in which their 2.5 million annual research papers are published -- does not call for or depend upon any changes at all in the peer review system. On the contrary, it would be a profound strategic (and factual) mistake to give the research community the incorrect impression that there is or ought to be any sort of link at all between providing open access to their own research literature by self-archiving it and any modification whatsoever in the peer review system that currently controls and certifies the quality of that research.

The question of peer-review modification has absolutely nothing to do with the institutional repositories and self-archiving that the SPARC paper is advocating. The only thing that authors and institutions need to be clearly and explicitly reassured about (because it is true) is that self-archiving in institutional Eprints Archives will preserve intact that very same peer-reviewed literature (2.5 million peer-reviewed papers annually, in 24,000 peer-reviewed journals) to which it is designed to provide open access.

Hence, apart from providing these reassurances, it is best to leave the certification/peer-review issue alone!

Here is where this potentially misleading and counterproductive topic is first introduced in the SPARC paper's section on "certification":

RC: "CERTIFICATION: Most of the institutional repository initiatives currently being developed rely on user (including author) communities to control the input of content. These can include academic departments, research centers and labs, administrative groups, and other sub-groups. Faculty and others determine what content merits inclusion and act as arbiters for their own research communities. Any at the initial repository submission stage thus comes from the sponsoring community within the institution, and the rigor of qualitative review and certification will vary."

There is a deep potential ambiguity here. The SPARC paper might merely be referring here to how much, and how, institutions might decide to self-vet their own research output when it is still in the form of pre-peer-review preprints,and that would be fine:

"1.5. Distinguish unrefereed preprints from refereed postprints"

But this institutional self-vetting of whatever of its own pre-refereeing research output a university decides to make public online should on no account be described as "qualitative review and certification"! That would instead be peer review, and peer review is the province of the qualified expert referees (most of them affiliated with other institutions, not the author's institution) who are called upon formally by the editors of independent peer-reviewed journals to referee the submissions to those journals; this quality-review is not the province of the institution that is submitting the research. Self-archiving is not self-publishing, and peer-review cannot be self-administered:

"1.4. Distinguish self-publishing (vanity press) from self-archiving (of published, refereed research)"

It merely invites confusion to characterize whatever preliminary self-vetting an institution may elect to do on the contents of the unrefereed preprint sector of its Eprint Archives with what it is that journals do when they implement peer review.

Worse, it might invite the conflation of self-archiving with self-publishing, if what the SPARC paper has in mind here is not just the unrefereed preprint sector of the institutional repository, but what would be its refereed postprint sector, consisting of those papers that are certified as having met a specific journal's established quality standards after classical peer review has taken its standard course:

"What is an Eprint Archive?"

"What is an Eprint?"

"What should be self-archived?"

"What is the purpose of self-archiving?"

"Is self-archiving publication?"

It is extremely important to clearly differentiate an institution's self-vetting of the unrefereed sector of its archive from the external quality control and certification provided by refereed journals that subsequently yields the refereed sector of its archive. Nothing is gained by conflating the two:

"Peer-review reform: Why bother with peer review?"

RC: "In some instances, the certification will be implicit and associative, deriving from the reputation of the author's host department. In others, it might involve more active review and vetting of the research by the author's departmental peers. While more formal than an associative certification, this certification would typically be less compelling than rigorous external peer review. Still, in addition to the primary level certification, this process helps ensure the relevance of the repository's content for the institution's authors and provides a peer-driven process that encourages faculty participation."

These are all reasonable possibilities for the preliminary self-selection and self-vetting of an institution's unrefereed preprints. But implying that they amount to anything more than that -- by using the term "peer" for both this internal self-vetting and external peer review, and suggesting that there is some sort of continuum of "compellingness" between the two -- is not helpful or clarifying but instead leads to (quite understandable) confusion and resistance on the part of researchers and their institutions:

For, having read the above, the potential user who previously knew the refereed journal literature -- consisting of 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, 2,5 million refereed articles per year, each clearly certified with each journal's quality-control label, and backed by its established reputation and impact -- now no longer has a clear idea what literature we might be talking about here! Are we talking about providing open access to that same refereed literature, or are we talking about substituting some home-grown, home-brew in its place?

Yet there is no need at all for this confusion: As correctly noted in the SPARC paper, University Eprint Archives ("Institutional Repositories") can have a variety of contents, but prominent among them will be the university's own research output (self-archived for the sake of the visibility, usage, impact, and their resulting individual and institutional rewards, as well described elsewhere in the SPARC paper). That institutional research output has, roughly, two embryonic stages: pre-peer-review (unrefereed) preprints and post-peer-review (refereed) postprints.

Now the pre-peer-review preprint sector of the archive may well require some internal self-vetting (this is up to the institution), but the post-peer-review postprint sector certainly does not, for the "vetting" there has been done -- as it always has been -- by the external referees and editors of the journals to which those papers were submitted as preprints, and by which they were accepted for publication (possibly only after several rounds of substantive revision and re-refereeing) once the refereeing process had transformed them into the postprints.

Nor is the internal self-vetting of the preprint sector any sort of substitute for the external peer review that dynamically transforms the preprints into refereed, journal-certified postprints.

In the above-quoted passage, the functions of the internal preprint self-vetting and the external postprint refereeing/certification are completely conflated -- and conflated, unfortunately, under what appears like an institutional vanity-press penumbra, a taint that the self-archiving initiative certainly does not need, if it is to encourage the opening of access to its existing quality-controlled, certified research literature, such as it is, rather than to some untested substitute for it.

RC: It should be noted that to serve the primary registration and certification functions, a repository must have some official or formal standing within the institution. Informal, grassroots projects - however well-intentioned - would not serve this function until they receive official sanction.

Universities should certainly establish whatever internal standards they see fit for pre-filtering their pre-refereeing research before making it public. But the real filtration continues to be what it always was, namely, classical peer review, implemented and certified as it always was. This needs to be made crystal clear!

RC: " OVERLAY JOURNALS: Third-party online journals that point to articles and research hosted by one or more repositories provide another mechanism for peer review certification in a disaggregated model."

Unfortunately, the current user of the existing, toll-access refereed-journal literature is becoming more and more confused about just what is actually being contemplated here! Does institutional self-archiving mean that papers lose the quality-control and certification of peer-reviewed journals and have it replaced by something else? By what? And what is the evidence that we would then still have the same literature we are talking about here? Does institutional self-archiving mean giving up the established forms of quality control and certification and replacing them by untested alternatives?

There also seems to be some confusion between the more neutral concept of (1) "overlay journals" (OJs) (e.g., Arthur Smith, which merely use Eprint Archives for input (the online submission/refereeing of author self-archived preprints) and output (the official certification of author self-archived postprints as having been peer-reviewed, accepted and "published" by the OJ in question), but leave the classical peer review system intact; and the vaguer and more controversial notion of (2) "deconstructed journals" (DJs) on the "disaggregated model" (e.g., John W.T. Smith), in which (as far as I can ascertain) what is being contemplated is the self-archiving of preprints and their subsequent "submission" to one or many evaluating/certifying entities (some of which may be OJs, others some other unspecified kind of certifier) who give the papers their respective "stamps of approval."

"Re: Alternative publishing models - was: Scholar's Forum: A New Model...

JWT Smith has made some testable empirical conjectures, which could eventually be tested in a future programme of empirical research on alternative research quality review and certification systems. But they certainly do not represent an already tested and already validated ("certified"?) alternative system, ready for implementation in place of the 2.5 million annual research articles that currently appear in the 24,000 established refereed journals!

As such, untested speculations of this kind are perhaps a little out of place in the context of a position paper that is recommending concrete (and already tested) practical steps to be taken by universities in order to maximize the visibility, accessibility and impact of their research output (and perhaps eventually to relieve their library serials budgetary burden too).

Author/institution self-archiving of research output -- both preprints and postprints -- is a tested and proven supplement to the classical journal peer review and publication system, but by no means a substitute for it. Self-archiving in Open Access Eprint Archives has now been going on for over a decade, and both its viability and its capacity to increase research visibility and impact have been empirically demonstrated.

Substitutes for the existing journal peer review and publication system, in contrast, require serious and systematic prior testing in their own right; there is nothing anywhere near ready there for practical recommendations other than the feasibility of Overlay Journals (OJs) as a means of increasing the efficiency and speed and lowering the cost of classical peer review. Almost no testing of any other model has been done yet; there are no generalizable findings available, and there are many prima facie problems with some of the proposed models (including JWT Smith's "disaggregated" model, [DJs]) that have not even been addressed:

See the discussion (and some of the prima facie problems) of JWT Smith's model under:

"Alternative publishing models - was: Scholar's Forum: A New Model..."

"Journals are Quality Certification Brand-Names"

"Central vs. Distributed Archives"

"The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)"

"Workshop on Open Archives Initiative in Europe"

In contrast, there has been a recent announcement that the Journal of Nonlinear Mathematical Physics will become openly accessible as an "overlay journal" (OJ) on the Physics Archive .

This is certainly a welcome development -- but note that JNMP is a classically peer-reviewed journal, and hence the "overlay" is not a substitute for classical peer review: It merely increases the visibility, accessibility and impact of the certified, peer-reviewed postprints while at the same time providing a faster, more efficient and economical way of processing submissions and implementing [classical] peer review online.

Indeed, Overlay Journals (OJs) are very much like the Open-Access Journals that are the target of Budapest Open Access Strategy 2.

Deconstructed/Disaggregated Journals (DJs), in contrast, are a much vaguer, more ambiguous, and more problematic concept, nowhere near ready for recommendation in a SPARC position paper.

RC: "While some of the content for overlay journals might have been previously published in refereed journals, other research may have only existed as a pre-print or work-in-progress."

This is unfortunately beginning to conflate the notion of the "overlay" journal (OJ) with some of the more speculative hypothetical features of the "deconstructed" or "disaggregated" journal (DJ):

The (informal) notion of an overlay journal is quite simple: If researchers are self-archiving their preprints and postprints in Eprint Archives anyway, there is, apart from any remaining demand for paper editions, no reason for a journal to put out its own separate edition at all: Instead, the preprint can first be deposited in the preprint sector of an Eprint Archive. The journal can be notified by the author that the deposit is intended as a formal submission. The referees can review the archived preprint. The author can revise it according to the editor's disposition letter and the referee reports. The revised draft can again be deposited and re-refereed as a revised preprint. Once a final draft is accepted, that then becomes tagged as the journal-certified (refereed) postprint.

End of story. That is an "overlay" journal (OJ), with the postprint permanently "certified" by the journal-name as having met that journal's established quality standards. The peer review is classical, as always; the only thing that has changed is the medium of implementation of the peer review and the medium of publication (both changes being in the direction of greater efficiency, functionality, speed, and economy).

A deconstructed/disaggregated journal (DJ) is an entirely different matter. As far as I can ascertain, what is being contemplated there is something like an approval system plus the possibility that the same paper is approved by a number of different "journals." The underlying assumptions are questionable:

(1) Peer review is neither a static red-light/green-light process nor a grading system, singular or multiple: The preprint does not receive one or a series of "tags." Peer review is a dynamic process of mediated interactions between an author and expert referees, answerable to an expert editor who selects the referees for their expertise and who determines what has to be done to meet the journal's quality standards -- a process during which the content of the preprint undergoes substantive revision, sometimes several rounds of it. The "grading" function comes only after the preprint has been transformed by peer review into the postprint, and consists of the journal's own ranking in the established (and known) hierarchy of journal quality levels (often also associated with the journal's citation impact factor).

It is not at all clear whether and how having raw preprints certified as approved -- singly or many times over -- by a variety of "deconstructed journals" (DJs) can yield a navigable, sign-posted literature of the known quality and quality-standards that we have currently. (And to instead interactively transform them into postprints is simply to reinvent peer review.)

(2) Even more important: Referees are a scarce resource. Referees sacrifice their precious research time to perform this peer-reviewing duty for free, normally at the specific request of the known editor of a journal of known quality, and with the knowledge that the author will be answerable to the editor. The result of this process is the navigable, quality-controlled refereed research literature we have now, with the quality-grade certified by the journal label and its established reputation.

It is not at all clear (and there are many prima facie reasons to doubt) that referees would give of their time and expertise to a "disaggregated" system to provide grades and comments on raw preprints that might or might not be graded and commented upon by other (self-selected? appointed?) referees as well, and might or might not be responsive to their recommendations. Nor is it clear that a disaggregated system would continue to yield a literature that was of any use to other users either.

Classical peer review already exists, and works, and it is the fruits of that classical peer review that we are talking about making openly accessible through self-archiving, nothing more (or less)! Journals (more specifically, their editorial boards and referees) are the current implementers of peer review. They have the experience, and their quality-control "labels" (the journal-names) have the established reputations (and citation impact factors) on which such "metadata" tags depend for their informational value in guiding users. There is no need either to abandon journals or to re-invent them under another name ("DJ").

A peer-reviewed journal, medium-independently, is merely a peer-review service provider and certifier. That is what they are, and that is what they will continue to be. Titles, editorial boards and their referees may migrate, to be sure. They have done so in the past, between different toll-access publishers; they could do so now too, if/when necessary, from toll-access to open-access publishers. But none of this involves any change in the peer review system; hence there should be no implication that it does.

(JWT Smith also contemplates paying referees for their services, another significant and untested departure from classical peer review, with the potential for bias and abuse -- if only there were enough money available to make it worth referees' while, which there is not! At realistic rates, offering to pay a referee for stealing his research time to review a paper would risk adding insult to injury.)

So there is every reason to encourage institutions to self-archive their research output, such as it is, before and after peer review. But there is no reason at all to link this with speculative scenarios about new publication and/or peer review systems, which could well put the very literature we are trying to make more usable and used at risk of ceasing to be useful or usable to anyone.

The message to researchers and their institutions should be very clear:

The self-archiving of your research output, before (preprints) and after (postprints) peer-reviewed publication will maximize its visibility, usage, and impact, with all the resulting benefits to you and your institution. Self-archiving is merely a supplement to the existing system, an extra thing that you and your institution can do, in order to enjoy these benefits. You need give up nothing, and nothing else need change.

In addition, one possible consequence, if enough researchers and their institutions self-archive enough research long enough, is that your institutional libraries might begin to enjoy some savings on their serials expenditures, because of subscription cancellations. This outcome is not guaranteed, but it is a possible further benefit, and might in turn lead to further restructuring of the journal publication system under the cancellation pressure -- probably in the direction of cutting costs and downsizing to the essentials, which will probably reduce to just providing peer review alone. The true cost of that added value, per paper, will in turn be much lower than the total cost now, and it will make most sense to pay for it out of the university's annual windfall subscriptions savings as a service, per outgoing paper, rather than as a product, per incoming paper, as in toll-access days. This outcome too would be very much in line with the practice of institutional self-archiving of outgoing research that is being advocated by the SPARC position paper.

The foregoing paragraph, however, only describes a hypothetical possibility, and need not and should not be counted as among the sure benefits of author/institution self-archiving -- which are, to repeat: maximized visibility, usage, and impact for institutional research output, resulting from maximized accessibility.

RC: "As a paper could appear in more than one journal and be evaluated by more than one refereeing body, these overlays would allow the aggregation and combination of research articles by multiple logical approaches - for example, on a particular theme or topic (becoming the functional equivalent of anthology volumes in the humanities and social sciences); across disciplines; or by affiliation (faculty departmental bulletins that aggregate the research of their members)."

Here the speculative notion of substituting "disaggregated journals" (DJs) for classical peer review is being conflated with the completely orthogonal matter of collections and alerting: An open-access online research literature can certainly be linked and bundled and recombined in a variety of very useful ways, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with the way its quality is arrived at and certified as such. Until an alternative has been found, tested and proven to yield at least comparable sign-posted quality, the classical peer review system is the only game in town. Let us not delay the liberation of its fruits from access-barriers still longer by raising the spectre of freeing them not only from the access-tolls but also from the self-same peer review system that (until further notice) generated and certified their quality!

"Rethinking "Collections" and Selection in the PostGutenberg Age"

RC: "Such journals exist today-for example, the Annals of Mathematics overlay to arXiv and Perspectives in Electronic Publishing, to name just two-and they will proliferate as the volume of distributed open access content increases."

The Annals of Mathematics is an "overlay" journal (OJ) of the kind I described above, using classical peer review. It is not an example of the "disaggregated" quality control system (DJ).

Perspectives in Electronic Publishing, in contrast, is merely a collection of links to already published work.

It does not represent any sort of alternative to classical peer review and journal publication.

RC: "Besides overlay journals pointing to distributed content, high-value information portals - centered around large, sophisticated data sets specific to a particular research community - will spawn new types of digital overlay publications based on the shared data.

"Journals that are overlays to institutional research repositories are merely certifying that papers bearing their tag have undergone their peer-review and have met their established quality standards. This has nothing to do with alternative forms of quality control, disaggregated or otherwise.

Post hoc collections (link-portals) have nothing to do with quality control either, although they will certainly be valuable for other purposes.

RC: "Regardless of journal type, the basis for assessing the quality of the certification that overlay journals provide differs little from the current journal system: eminent editors, qualified reviewers, rigorous standards, and demonstrated quality."

Not only does it not differ: Overlay Journals (OJs) will provide identical quality and standards -- as long as "overlay" simply means having the implementation of peer review (and the certification of its outcome) piggy-back on the institutional archives, as it should.

Alternative forms of quality control (e.g., DJs), on the other hand, will first have to demonstrate that they work.

And neither of these is to be confused with the post-hoc function of aggregating online content, peer-reviewed or otherwise.

This should all be made crystal clear in the SPARC paper, partly by stating it in a clear straighforward way, and partly by omitting the speculative options that only cloud the picture needlessly (and have nothing to do with institutional self-archiving and its rationale [open access], but simply risk confusing and discouraging would-be self-archivers and their institutions).

RC: "In addition to these analogues to the current journal certification system, a disaggregated model also enables new types of certification models. Roosendaal and Geurts have noted the implications of internal and external certification systems."

Please, let us distinguish the two by calling "internal certification" pre-certification (or "self-certification") so as not to confuse it with peer review, which is by definition external (except in that happy but rare case where an institution happens to house enough of the world's qualified experts on a given piece of research not to have to consult any outside experts).

A good deal of useful pre-filtering can be done by institutions on their own research output, especially if the institution is large enough. (CERN has a very rigorous internal review system that all outgoing research must undergo before it is submitted to a journal for peer review.)

But, on balance, "internal certification" rightly raises the spectre of vanity press publication. Nor is it a coincidence that when universities assess their own researchers for promotion and tenure, they tend to rely on the external certification provided by peer reviewed journals (weighted sometimes by their impact factors) rather than just internal review. The same is true of the external assessors of university research output.

So, please, let us not link the very desirable and face-valid goal of maximizing universities' research visibility and research impact through open access provided by institutional self-archiving with the much more dubious matter of institutional self-certification.

RC: "Certification may pertain at the level of internal, methodological considerations, pertinent to the research itself - the standard basis for most scholarly peer review. Alternatively, the work may be gauged or certified by criteria external to the research itself - for example, by its economic implications or practical applicability. Such internal and external certification systems would typically operate in different contexts and apply different criteria. In a disaggregated model, these multiple certification levels can co-exist."

This is all rather vague, and somewhat amateurish, and would (in my opinion) have been better left out of this otherwise clear and focussed call for institutional self-archiving of research output.

And the idea of expecting referees to spend their precious time refereeing already-refereed and already-certified (i.e., already-published) papers yet again is unrealistic in the extreme, especially considering the growing number of papers, the scarcity of qualified expert referees (who are otherwise busy doing the research itself), and the existing backlogs and delays in refereeing and publication.

Besides, as indicated already, refereeing is not passive tagging or grading: It is a dynamic, interactive, and answerable process in which the preprint is transformed into the accepted postprint, and certified as such. Are we to imagine each of these papers being re-written every time they are submitted to yet another DJ?

There is a lot to be said for postpublication revision and updating of the postprints ("post-postprints") in response to postpublication commentary (or to correct substantive errors that come to light later), but it only invites confusion to call that "disaggregated journal publication." The refereed, journal-certified postprint should remain the critical, canonical, scholarly and archival milestone that it is, perpetually marking the fact that that draft successfully met that journal's established quality standards. Further iterations of this refereeing/certification process make no sense (apart from being profligate with scarce resources) and should in any case be tested for feasibility and outcome before being recommended!

RC: "To support both new and existing certification mechanisms, quality certification metadata could be standardized to allow OAI-compliant harvesting of that information. This would allow a reader to determine whether there is any certificationinformation about an article, regardless of where the article originated or where it is discovered."

Might I venture to put this much more simply (and restrict it to the refereed research literature, which is my only focus)? By far the most relevant and informative "metadatum" certifying the information in a research paper is the JOURNAL-NAME of the journal in which it was published (signalling, as it does, the journal's established reputation, quality level, and impact factor)! (Yes, the AUTHOR-NAME, and the AUTHOR-INSTITUTION metadata-tags may be useful sometimes too, but those cases do not, as they say, "scale" -- otherwise style="font-style: italic;">self-certification would have replaced peer review long ago. COMMENT-tags would be welcome too, but caveat emptor.)

"Peer Review, Peer Commentary, and Eprint Archive Policy"

Please let us not lose sight of the fact that the main purpose of author/institution self-archiving in institutional Eprint Archives is to maximize the visibility, uptake and impact of research output by maximizing its accessibility (by provising open access). It is not intended as an experimental implementation of speculations about untested new forms of quality control! That would be to put this all-important literature needlessly at risk (and would simply discourage researchers and their institutions from self-archiving it at all).

There is a huge amount of further guiding information that can be derived from the literature to help inform navigation, search and usage. A lot of it will be digitometric analysis based on usage measures such as citation, hits, and commentary

But none of these digitometrics should be mistaken for certification, which, until further notice, is a systematic form of expert human interaction and judgement called peer review.

Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science 79(5): 629-638.

RC: "Depending on the goals established by each institution, an institutional repository could contain any work product generated by the institution's students, faculty, non-faculty researchers, and staff. This material might include student electronic portfolios, classroom teaching materials, the institution's annual reports, video recordings, computer programs, data sets, photographs, and art works-virtually any digital material that the institution wishes to preserve. However, given SPARC's focus on scholarly communication and on changing the structure of the scholarly publishing model, we will define institutional repositories here-whatever else they might contain-as collecting, preserving, and disseminating scholarly content. This content may include pre-prints and other works-in-progress, peer-reviewed articles, monographs, enduring teaching materials, data sets and other ancillary research material, conference papers, electronic theses and dissertations, and gray literature."

This passage is fine, and refocusses on the items of real value in the SPARC position paper.

RC: "To control and manage the accession of this content requires appropriate policies and mechanisms, including content management and document version control systems. The repository policy framework and technical infrastructure must provide institutional managers the flexibility to control who can contribute, approve, access, and update the digital content coming from a variety of institutional communities and interest groups (including academic departments, libraries, research centers and labs, and individual authors). Several of the institutional repository infrastructure systems currently being developed have the technical capacity to embargo or sequester access to submissions until the content has been approved by a designated reviewer. The nature and extent of this review will reflect the policies and needs of each individual institution, possibly of each participating institutional community. As noted above, sometimes this review will simply validate the author's institutional affiliation and/or authorization to post materials in the repository; in other instances, the review will be more qualitative and extensive, serving as a primary certification."

This is all fine, as long as it is specified that what is at issue is institutional pre-certification or self-certification of its unrefereed research (preprints).

For peer-reviewed research the only institutional authentication required is at most that the AUTHOR-NAME and JOURNAL-NAME are indeed as advertised! (The integrity of the full text could be vetted too, but I'm inclined to suggest that that would be a waste of time and resources at this point. What is needed right now is that institutions should create and fill their own Eprint Archives with their research output, pre- and post-refereeing, immediately. The "definitive" text, until journals really all become "overlay" journals, is currently in the hands of the publishers and subscribing libraries. For the time being, let authors "self-certify" their refereed, published texts as being what they say they are; let's leave worrying about more rigorous authentication for later. For now, the goal should be to self-archive as much research output as possible, as soon as possible, with minimal fuss. The future will take care of itself.

RC: "Institutional repository policies, practices, and expectations must also accommodate the differences in publishing practices between academic disciplines. The early adopter disciplines that developed discipline-specific digital servers were those with an established pre-publication tradition. Obviously, a discipline's existing peer-to-peer communication patterns and research practices need to be considered when developing institutional repository content policies and faculty outreach programs. Scholars in disciplines with no prepublication tradition will have to be persuaded to provide a prepublication version; they might fear plagiarism or anticipate copyright or other acceptance problems in the event they were to submit the work for formal publication. They might also fear the potential for criticism of work not yet benefiting from peer review and editing. For these non-preprint disciplines, a focus on capturing faculty post-publication contributions may prove a more practical initial strategy."

Agreed. And here are some prima facie FAQs for allaying each of these by now familiar prima facie fears:

Authentication

Corruption

Certification

Evaluation

Peer Review

Copyright

Plagiarism

Priority

Tenure/Promotion

Legality

Publisher Agreement

RC: "Including published material in the repository will also help overcome concerns, especially from scholars in non-preprint disciplines, that repository working papers might give a partial view of an author's research."

Indeed. And that is the most important message of all -- and the primary function of institutional eprint archives: to provide open access to all peer-reviewed research output!

RC: "Therefore, including published material, while raising copyright issues that need to be addressed, should lower the barrier to gaining non-preprint traditions to participate. Where authors meet traditional publisher resistance to the self-archiving rights necessary for repository posting, institutions can negotiate with those publishers to allow embargoed access to published research."

Fine.

RC: "While gaining the participation of faculty authors is essential to effecting an evolutionary change in the structure of scholarly publishing, early experience suggests better success when positioning the repository as a complement to, rather than as a replacement for, traditional print journals."

Not only "positioning" it as a complement: Clearly proclaiming that a complement, not a replacement, is exactly what it is! Not just with respect to the relatively trivial issue of on-paper vs. on-line, but also with respect to the much more fundamental one, about journal peer review (vide supra). Institutional self-archiving is certainly no substitute for external peer review. (This is is stated clearly in some parts of the SPARC paper, but unfortunately contradicted, or rendered ambiguous, in other parts.)

RC: "This course partially obviates the most problematic objection to open access digital publishing: that it lacks the quality and prestige of established journals."

This is a non-sequitur and a misunderstanding: The quality and prestige come from being certified as having met the quality standards of an established peer-reviewed journal. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the medium (on-paper or on-line), nor with the access system (toll-access or open-access); and it certainly cannot be attained by self-archiving unrefereed preprints only. The papers must of course continue to be submitted to peer-reviewed journals for refereeing, revision, and subsequent certification.

RC: "This also allows repository proponents to build a case for faculty participation based on the primary benefits that repositories deliver directly to participants, rather than relying on secondary benefits and on altruistic faculty commitment to reforming a scholarly communications model that has served them well on an individual level."

I could not follow this. The primary benefits of self-archiving are the maximization of the visibility, uptake and impact of research output by maximizing its accessibility (through open-access). Researchers certainly will not, and should not, self-archive in order to support untested new "certification" conjectures, nor even to ease their institutions' serials budgets. The appeal must be straight to researchers' self-interest in promoting their own research.

RC: "Additionally, value-added services such as enhanced citation indexing and name authority control will allow a more robust qualitative analysis of faculty performance where impact on one's field is a measurement. The aggregating mechanisms that enable the overall assessment of the qualitative impact of a scholar's body of work will make it easier for academic institutions to emphasize the quality, and de-emphasize the quantity, of an author's work.53 This will weaken the quantity-driven rationale for the superfluous splintering of research into multiple publication submissions. The ability to gauge a faculty member's publishing performance on qualitative rather than quantitative terms should benefit both faculty and their host institutions."

All true, but strategically, it is best to stress maximization of existing performance indicators, rather than hypothetical new ones:

Harnad, S. (2001) "Research Access, Impact and Assessment are linked." Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.

RC: "Learned society publishers are for the most part far less aggressive in exploiting their monopolies than their for-profit counterparts. Even so, most society publishing programs, even in a not-for-profit context, often contribute significantly to covering an organization's operating expenses and member services. It is not surprising, then, that proposals advocating institutional repositories and other open access dissemination of scholarly research generate anxiety, if not outright resistance, amongst society publishers. While one hopes that societies adopt the broadest perspective possible in serving the needs of their members-including the broadest possible access to the scholarly research in the field-it is unlikely that societies will trade their organizations' solvency for the greater good of scholarship. It is important, therefore, to review how society publishers can continue to operate in an environment of institutional repositories and other open access systems."

Once the causal connection between access and impact is cleary
demonstrated to the research community, it is highly unlikely that they will knowingly choose to continue to subsidise their Learned Societies' "good works" with the lost impact of their own work, by continuing to hold it hoastage to impact-blocking access-tolls: Societies will need to find better ways to support their good works.

RC: "Some suggest that institutional repositories, pre-print servers, and electronic aggregations of individual articles will undermine the importance of the journal as a packager of articles. However, institutional repositories and other open access mechanisms will only threaten the survival of scholarly journals if they defeat the brand positions of the established society journals and if individual article impact metrics replace journal impact factors in academic advancement decisions."

Most of the above is not true, and hence better left unsaid.

It is quite possible (and hence should not be denied) that author/institution self-archiving of refereed research may eventually necessitate downsizing by publishers (to become peer-review/certification service-providers :

"Hypothetical Sequel"

"Downsizing"

But none of this has anything to do with journal- vs author- impact metrics! The ISI's Web of Science has already made it possible (and very useful) for institutions and funding agencies) to use either journal or author citation impact metrics for assessment, whichever is more useful and informative, and it is very likely that weighting publications only by their journal-impact will prove a much blunter instrument than weighting them by the paper's and/or author's impact:.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35

But once the institutional Eprint Archives are up and filled, far richer and more sensitive digitometric measures of impact and usage are waiting to be devised and tested on this vast corpus. A taste is already available from citebase and its correlator.

See the bibliography of ongoing research on these new digitometric performance indicators.

RC: "On the first point, journal brand reputation will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be integral to the assessment of article and author quality."

For the reader/user/navigator of the literature, certainly. But more sensitive measures are developing too, for the evaluator, funder and employer. The all-important JOURNAL-NAME tag, and the established quality level and impact to which it attests will continue to be indispensable sign-posts, but a great deal more will be built on top of them, once the entire refereed journal literature (24K journals) is online and open-access.

RC: "Market-aware journals with prominent editorial boards and well-established publishing histories should be able to maintain their prestige, even with a proliferation of article-based aggregations. As to the second point, while new metrics will evolve that demonstrate the quantitative impact of individual articles, rigorous peer review will continue to provide value. Even after individual article impact analysis becomes widespread and accepted by academic tenure committees, stringent refereeing standards will continue to play a central role in indicating quality.

"Correct, and mainly because peer review is the cornerstone of it all.

RC: "Learned societies have long-standing relationships with their members and they should be able to act as focal points for the research communities they represent. While society dues typically include a journal subscription, society members also enjoy other benefits of membership-and, presumably, additional value-beyond the journal subscription itself. Societies, therefore, provide community-supporting services to justify their members' dues besides the value allocated to the journal subscription. While a commercial publisher would find it difficult to charge a subscription fee for a journal freely available online, society publishers-by repositioning the benefits of membership-might well prove able to allow journal article availability via open access repositories without experiencing substantial membership cancellations or revenue attrition."

In other words, members of learned societies may still be willing to pay membership dues to support their societies' "good works." But there is no need to call these dues "subscriptions"!

And the cost of peer review itself can be covered very easily out of institutional subscription savings, if and when it becomes necessary.

RC: Given the extent of government and private philanthropic foundation funding for academic research, especially in the sciences, such funding agencies have a vested interest in broadening the dissemination of scientific research. There are several mechanisms by which government and private funding agencies could help to achieve this broadened dissemination. It has been suggested that government and foundation research grants could be written to include subsidies for author page charges and other input-side fees to support open access business models. Such stipulations would help effect change in those disciplines, primarily in the sciences, where author page charges are the norm. Obviously, such subsidies would be less effective in disciplines where input-side models bear the stigma of vanity publishing; still, over time, this resistance could be overcome.

If/when open-access prevails enough to reduce publisher income, it will at the same time increase institutional savings (from cancelled subscriptions). As peer review costs much less than the whole of what journal publishers used to do, it can easily be paid for, at the author/institution end, as a service cost for outgoing research instead of as a product cost for incoming research as it is now, out of just a portion of institutions' annual windfall savings, as indicated below:

RC: "ECONOMICALLY: The burden of scholarly journal costs on academic libraries has been well documented. While the variety of institutional contexts and potential implementations make it difficult to project institutional repository development and operational costs with any precision, the evidence so far suggests that the resources required would represent but a fraction of the journal costs that libraries now incur and over which they have little control."

And that is mainly because peer review alone -- which will be journal publishers' only remaining essential service if and when all journal publication becomes all open-access publication -- costs far less than what journal subscription/license tolls used to cost. The per-paper archiving cost, distributed over the research institutions that generate the outgoing papers, is negligible, compared to what it cost for incoming papers in the toll-based system.

"The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)"

RC: "Several institutions have applied the e-prints self-archiving software to implement institutional repositories. Developed at the University of Southampton, the free eprints.org self-archiving software now comes configured to run an institutional pre-prints archive. The generic version of e-prints is fully interoperable with all the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol."

Not an institutional pre-prints archive: An institutional Eprints Archive. (Eprints = preprints + postprints)

RC: "Universities that have implemented e-prints solutions include Cal Tech, the University of Nottingham, University of Glasgow, and the Australian National University. The participants in all these programs have described their experiences, providing practical insights that should benefit others contemplating an OAI-compliant e-prints implementation."

See the CalTech review of their experience with eprints for SPARC.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009, Stevan Harnad [SH2] wrote:

On June 27, 1994, Stevan Harnad [SH1] wrote:

SH2: "What on earth do you mean by "esoteric"? Are we supposed to have different criteria for a publication depending on how big a readership it is likely to have? In that case we need a sliding scale whose value we cannot possibly know in advance for every candidate piece of writing."

SH3: Just dull-wittedness. It should have been obvious already then that the primary target was refereed journal articles and that "esoteric" was a red herring.

SH2: "Paper publishing? Is this, then, merely about getting published articles online? That's not likely to be a very radical proposal, since (today, in 1994) it is surely a foregone conclusion that publishers will all have online editions within a few years. [So is this about] online, online-only, or free-online?"

SH3: More somnambulism: It should have been clearly stated as "free online access to refereed journal articles" (i.e., OA).

SH2: "Give-away writing might be a natural kind, but what distinguishes give-away writing from non-give-away writing? How does one recognize it in advance? And surely the distinction is not just based on probable market but on some other aspect of academic motivation. After all, textbooks are as "academic" as one can get, yet textbook authors are certainly motivated to sell their words, otherwise many would not do the work of writing them."

SH3: Addle-brainedness, yet again:

Refereed research articles are written purely for research usage and impact not for sales revenue. That's how you distinguish them. And you recognize them by the journal-names.

SH2: "Who are "peers"? And what is the reason for this obsession with reaching their "eyes and minds"? The fact that they are all in some sort of "esoteric" club surely is not the explanation."

SH3: Peers are the fellow-researchers worldwide for whose usage peer-reviewed research is conducted and published.

"Eyes and minds" should have been research uptake, usage and impact (e.g., as measured by downloads and citations).

SH2: "And this "building on one another's contributions" sounds cosy enough, but what is really going on here? It's certainly not about verbal Lego Blocks!"

SH3: Research uptake, usage, applications, citations.

SH2: "Fine. These authors are saints, or monks. But why? For what?"

SH3: Their research progress, their funding and their careers are based on the uptake and usage of their research findings, not on income from the sales of their writings. (User access-barriers are also author impact-barriers.)

SH2: "The criterion sounds like it's esotericity itself, but why? Besides, that's circular: Is give-away writing esoteric because its target readership is tiny? Or is its target readership tiny because the writing's esoteric?"

SH3: Fuzzy thinking again: Esotericity, though roughly correlated, is a red herring. Give-away writing is give-away writing, and wants to be freely accessible online because access-barriers are usage- and impact-barriers. (Yes, the potential users of most refereed research are few, but that's not the point, nor the criterion: the need to maximize usage and impact is the criterion.)

SH2: "And FTP archiving sounds fine, but isn't it already obsolete? This is June 27 1994, but Tim Berners-Lee created the Web 5 years ago!"

SH3: Ignorance, sir, pure ignorance.

SH2: "And there you go again with "electronic publication"? Is this just about moving to electronic publication? But that's surely going to happen anyway."

SH3: Fuzziness, pure fuzziness. It is and was about free online access, not about online publication.

SH2: "And is "esoteric" publication, then, merely "vanity press" publication? If so, then it's no wonder its likely readership is so tiny..."

SH3: It's about refereed publication, hence not vanity-press. (But there was definitely muddle and ambiguity regarding unrefereed vs. refereed drafts. The focus should have been directly on refereed drafts, with unrefereed drafts being only a potential entry point in some cases.)

SH2: "But physicists (who are doing it on the Web, by the way, not via FTP) have already been doing much the same thing (sharing their pre-refereeing drafts) on paper for years now, even before the web, or FTP, email, or the online medium itself. Is that all you mean by "esoteric"? And if so, the online medium's there now: those who want to share drafts are free to share them that way. That isn't even "publication," it's just public sharing of work-in-progress."

SH3: You're right, and that's yet another gap in my original logic. Nothing is or was stopping those who might wish to make their unrefereed drafts publicly accessible online from doing so; but that is not the point, nor the problem, nor the objective.

The problem is access to refereed, published research. All potential users need access to that; and all authors want their refereed research to be accessible to all its potential users (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happens to be published); whereas not all (or even most) authors want their unrefereed drafts to be accessible to all.

(And, yes, "esoteric" is once again a red herring. It ought to have been "peer-reviewed research" all along, to short-circuit potential ambiguities and misunderstandings.)

SH2: "Why didn't you say that in the first place? "peer-reviewed" rather than "esoteric.""

SH3: Mea culpa.

SH2: "But, again, nothing stands in the way of authors sharing unrefereed drafts online with their tiny intended public prior to submitting them for peer-review and then publication, does it? What's your point?"

SH3: The point is and should have been about peer-reviewed drafts. Earlier unrefereed drafts were just one potential entry point. (Perhaps I was just too timid or unimaginative to say "post your peer-reviewed drafts" at that time.)

But for me, another major motivation for posting writings was to elicit quote/commentary (as in this very commentary). And although the refereed, published draft can elicit commentary too, it is especially useful at the draft stage, when it can still help shape the final published version.

SH2: "But is [what's sought] really the "patina" of paper publishing, or the patina of peer-review, and a given publication's prior track record for peer-review quality standards?"

SH3: Just peer-review and track-record. The rest was again just ill-thought-through muddle.

(There may have been some faint excuse for such muddle way back in 1994; but one can hardly invoke that today, 15 years later, when all of these muddles have since been raised, rehearsed, and resolved, many times over, in countless online discussion forums, FAQs, conferences, and published articles, chapters and books. Hence the frayed patience of weary archivangelists even if they themselves are not free of original sin, insofar as not having thought all things through sufficiently rigorously at the very outset is concerned. There is no excuse for the same old muddles 15 years on...)

SH2: "And what, exactly, is the scope of "peer-reviewed publication"? Apart from journal articles (and refereed conference proceedings), aren't monographs, edited books and even textbooks "peer-reviewed"? And aren't some of them "non-esoteric," because revenue-seeking?"

SH3: There is genuine uncertainty about the cut-off point. All peer-reviewed journal articles are, without exception, author give-aways, hence all can and should be made freely accessible online to maximize their usage and impact.

The same may be true for some monographs, edited books (and possibly even some textbooks, if the authors are magnanimous). But none of these other categories is exception-free (rather the contrary). Freeing authors' writings online against their wills cannot be the objective of the Open Access (OA) movement. Nor can providing free access to writings to which the author does not want there to be free access serve as the basis for OA mandates by institutions and funders.

That is why the exception-free give-away content -- written solely for usage and impact -- is the primary target of the OA movement (and of OA mandates).

By the way, another enormous oversight in the Subversive Proposal (though I can hardly imagine how it could have been anticipated at that time) was the failure to call for (what we would now call) Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders. It only became apparent after another half-decade had passed with researchers' fingers still not stirred into motion by the Subversive Proposal that mandates would be necessary...

SH2: "The (obvious) flaw with the hope of making all refereed publications free online by first making their unrefereed drafts free online is that, unlike physicists (and, before them, computer scientists, and economists), most authors in most disciplines do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public (either because they consider it unscholarly, or because they fear professional embarrassment, or because they don't want to immortalize their errors, or because they thing unrefereed results could be dangerous, e.g. to public health).

Hence if the road to free online access is reserved for papers that their authors are willing to make publicly accessible as unrefereed drafts first, it will not cover much of refereed research in most disciplines."

SH3: All true, and, again, mea culpa.

The road to the optimal solution -- the one that covers all refereed research, immediately upon acceptance for publication, has been somewhat circuitous:

First, the Subversive Proposal recommended self-archiving all unrefereed preprints (but that would not work for the many researchers and disciplines that do not wish to make unrefereed drafts public).

A variant on that strategy was the "preprints plus corrigenda" strategy, which recommended self-archiving unrefereed preprints and later also self-archiving a file containing all corrections arising from the refereeing. Likewise inadequate, partly because, again, many authors don't want to make unrefereed drafts public, and also because it would be awkward and inconvenient for authors to have to archive -- and for users to have to consult -- separate preprint and corrigenda files.

It has to be added that the P&C strategy was never really intended as an actual overt practice: it was just intended to assuage the worries of those who thought there was some sort of insurmountable obstacle in principle to self-archiving the refereed version in cases where the publisher objected.

In reality, some publishers have objected even to self-archiving the unrefereed preprint [this is called the "Ingelfinger Rule"], but most have since dropped this objection. And the sensible strategy for the refereed postprint is to self-archive it and reconsider only if and when a publisher requests a take-down. Sixty-three percent of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint. And in the past two decades, there have been virtually no publisher take-down requests for the many million refereed postprints that have been self-archived. It's absurd to let a one in a million exception drive practice, especially when all it would entail would be a take-down!

But for those authors (and for those mandates) that insist on refraining from making the refereed postprint OA for the remaining 37% of articles until their publishers endorse it (most endorse it after an embargo period), the best author practice is to deposit the refereed final draft in their own institutional repositories (IRs) anyway, immediately upon acceptance for publication, but to set access to it as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access during any embargo. That way the repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to any would-be user during the embargo.

At the time of the Subversive Proposal, however, neither the OAI interoperability protocol, nor OAI-compliant institutional repository software, nor the notion of self-archiving mandates yet existed. So today's Best Practice solution was not yet in sight, namely: deposit, and mandate deposit, of all refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance; set access to the 63% of deposits that are published in Green journals to OA immediately; and, if you wish, set access to Closed Access for the remaining 37%, and rely on the Almost-OA Button during the embargo.

Once such IDOA -- Immediate Deposit, Optional Access -- mandates are adopted globally by institutions and funders, the days of embargoes are numbered anyway, under the overwhelming pressure of the benefits of OA.

And another thing that was not yet in sight in 1994 was the fact that the benefits of OA (likewise not yet named then!) could and would be demonstrated to authors and their institutions and funders quantitatively, in the form of the scientometric evidence of the "OA Advantage": significantly increased download and citation impact for OA articles, compared to non-OA ones. This too would eventually go on to encourage mandates as well as the increased the use of OA content to generate rich new metrics for measuring and rewarding research impact.

None of this was quite obvious yet in 1994.

SH2: "And what about all the published reprints that authors would prefer not to have shared with the world when they were just unrefereed drafts?"

SH3: Self-archive the refereed version immediately upon publication (and rely on the Button if you wish to observe the access-embargo).

SH2: "How and why did this "subversive proposal" (to the author community) turn into speculations about publishing and publishers?"

SH3: This is the plaint plagues and shames me the most! For the needless and counterproductive speculation about the future of publication -- along with all the essential features of what would eventually be called "Gold OA publishing" -- were all introduced in that proposal, with the result that premature "gold fever" contributed to distracting from and delaying the ("Green OA") self-archiving that was the essence of the Subversive Proposal.

But I do think it was unavoidable -- in responding to the (now at least) 38 prima facie worries that immediately began to be raised time and time again about self-archiving -- particularly worries #8, #9, #14, #17, #19, #28, #30, & #31 -- by sketching the obvious way in which publication cost-recovery could evolve into the Gold OA model if and when universal Green OA self-archiving should ever make it necessary.

But I never imagined that the prospect of gold would become such an attraction -- mostly to those, like librarians, not in a position to provide Green OA themselves, but groaning under the burden of the serials crisis, but also to publishing reform theorists more interested in publishing economics and iniquities than in researchers' immediate access needs -- that gold fever would propagate and distract from providing and mandating Green OA, rather than reassuring and reinforcing it. (For some reason that neither Peter Suber nor I can quite fathom, people take to Gold much more readily than to Green, even to the extent of imagining that OA is synonymous with Gold OA publishing.)

Well, one reaps what one sows, and I accept a large part of the blame for having already began to sprinkle gold dust way back in 1994, and continuing to stir it for some years to come -- -- until I at last learned from sorry experience to stop speculating about tomorrow's hypothetical transitions and focus only on the tried, tested and sure practical means of reaching 100% OA today: universal Green OA deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

I still think, however, that the proof-of-principle for Gold OA publishing by BMC and PLoS was, on balance, useful, even though premature, because it did serve to allay worries that universal Green OA self-archiving would destroy peer-reviewed publication altogether, by making subscriptions unsustainable, and hence making publication costs unrecoverable. No, it would merely induce a transition to Gold-OA publishing to recover the costs of publication. (Moreover, the costs of publishing then, after having achieved universal Green OA, would be far lower -- just the costs of peer review alone -- and paid for out of a fraction of the self-same annual institutional windfall savings on which the premise of subscription collapse underlying this set of worries is predicated.)

But there I go, succumbing to gold fever again...

SH2: "In this speculation about publishing media and costs, what have "pages" to do with it? And what, exactly, does the 25% figure pay for (and what is the 75% that is no longer needed)?"

SH3: Pages have nothing to do with it. That was just a regrettable momentary lapse into the papyrocentric thinking of the Gutenberg era.

The right reckoning is total publication costs per article. And once authors are all systematically depositing their refereed drafts in their institutional repositories, and users are using those OA drafts instead of the publisher's proprietary version, the global network of IRs becomes the access-provider and archive and the only remaining function (and expense) remaining for journals is the implementation of peer review, certified by their name and track-record. (The peers, of course, continue to referee for free, as they always did.)

SH2: "You seem to be pretty generous with other people's money. ["advance subsidies (from authors' page charges, learned society dues, university publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies)" And you seem to have forgotten the money already being paid for subscriptions."

SH3: More of the perils of premature speculation. Of course no extra funds are needed if the transition to Gold OA only comes after universal Green OA has been reached, and only if and when that universal Green OA in turn makes subscriptions unsustainable. For then, by the very same token, the subscription cancellation releases the funds to pay for Gold OA -- whereas paying pre-emptively for Gold OA now, while it is unnecessary, because most of the essential journals are still subscription-based, requires extra money (and at an inflated -- because again premature -- cost).

But you see how easy it is to keep getting taken up with Gold OA speculation instead of attending to Green OA practice, within reach since 1994, yet still not grasped?

SH2: "But what, exactly, is this money supposed to be paying for? (Again, there seems to be conflation of online-only publication, and its costs, with free online access-provision: surely they are not the same thing.)"

SH3: Today: nothing. After universal Green OA -- if and when that makes subscriptions collapse -- it will pay for peer-review alone.

SH2: "This still sounds quite muddled and vague: We've heard about "esoteric," give-away writings, but it has not yet been made clear what they are, and why they are give-ways."

SH3: Refereed journal articles, written only for research impact.

SH2: "We have heard about online publication, and online-only publication."

SH3: The Subversive Proposal was only meant to be about making refereed research freely accessible online.

SH2: "We have heard about (some) authors making their unrefereed drafts free online. But how (and why) do we get from that to free online refereed publication?"

SH3: Forget about the unrefereed drafts; they're just extras. The way to make refereed research free online is to deposit your refereed final draft, free for all, in your Institution's OA Repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

SH2: "And [how (and why) do we get] from there to paying to publish instead of paying to subscribe? (What needs to be paid for, how and why? And how do we get there from here, given that most authors do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public?)"

SH3: Right now, nothing needs extra to be paid for. Subscriptions are paying for it all, handsomely. All that's needed is author keystrokes, to deposit all final refereed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That's all that's been needed since 1994, but now we know the keystrokes need to be mandated, to set the fingers in motion, so what's needed is institutional and funder Green OA self-archiving mandates.

All of that is for sure, and will generate 100% OA with certainty.

The rest is speculation: If universal Green OA makes subscriptions no longer sustainable, publishers will cut costs, downsize to the essentials -- providing peer review alone -- paid for, on the Gold OA model, out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings.

SH2: Sounds like a rather inchoate proposal to me... (And you reputedly expect this to happen overnight? Might we have some more details about what we might expect to happen on that fabled night?)"

SH: Inchoate it was, in 1994, though the practical means to do it overnight (fingers) were already available in 1994. Since then, the OAI protocol and the IR software have made it a lot simpler and easier. But the keystrokes remain to be done. Thirty eight prima facie worries have kept fingers in a state of Zeno's Paralysis, despite all being answered, fully, many, many times over.

Now it is time to mandate the keystrokes. That too could be done overnight, by the stroke of a Department Head's, DVC's or VC's pen, as Wendy Hall (Southampton), Tom Cochrane (QUT), and Bernard Rentier (Liege) have since shown.

Will it be another 15 years before the remaining 10,000 universities and research institutions (or at least the top 1000) wield the mighty pen to unleash the even mightier keystrokes (as 68 Institutions and Departments, and 42 Funders have already done)? Or will we keep dithering about Gold OA, publishing reform, peer review reform, re-use rights, author addenda, preservation and the other 38 factors causing Zeno's Paralysis) for another decade and a half?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Commentary on:
Collini, S. (2009) Impact on humanities: Researchers must take a stand now or be judged and rewarded as salesmen. Times Literary Supplement. November 13 2009.

One can agree whole-heartedly with Professor Collini that much of the spirit and the letter of the RAE and the REF and their acronymous successors are wrong-headed and wasteful -- while still holding that measures ("metrics") of scholarly/scientific impact are not without some potential redeeming value, even in the Humanities. After all, even expert peer judgment, if expressed rather than merely silently mentalized, is measurable. (Bradley's observation on the ineluctability of metaphysics applies just as aptly to metrics: "Show me someone who wishes to refute metaphysics and I'll show you a metaphysician with a rival system.")

The key is to gather as rich, diverse and comprehensive a spectrum of candidate metrics as possible, and then test and validate them jointly, discipline by discipline, against the existing criteria that each discipline already knows and trusts (such as expert peer judgment) so as to derive initial weights for those metrics that prove to be well enough correlated with the discipline's trusted existing criteria to be useable for prediction on their own.

Prediction of what? Prediction of future "success" by whatever a discipline's (or university's or funder's) criteria for success and value might be. There is room for putting a much greater weight on the kinds of writings that fellow-specialists within the discipline find useful, as Professor Collini has rightly singled out, rather than, say, success in promoting those writings to the general public. The general public may well derive more benefit indirectly, from the impact of specialised work on specialists, than from its direct impact on themselves. And of course industrial applications are an impact metric only for some disciplines, not others.

Ceterum censeo: A book-citation impact metric is long overdue, and would be an especially useful metric for the Humanities.

Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18.

Harnad, S. (2008) Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics Open Access Archivangelism October 10, 2008.

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 Special Issue on "The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance"

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1)

Soon after OA-week, the UK's Times Higher Education (THE) published two articles on OA plus an editorial on OA Mandates and Metrics. At the same time, Professor Eberhard Hilf announced that in Germany Lars Fischer had initiated a petition to the German Bundestag to mandate Green OA, supported by the Coalition for Action, and inviting signatories from around the world.

OA's chronicler and critic, Richard Poynder, lost no time in interviewing Lars Fischer about his petition:

"German petition takes Open Access movement by surprise"
Interview of Lars Fischer by Richard Poynder
Open and Shut 13 November 2009
Also recommended:

Times Higher Education (THE) Editorial:
"Put all the results out in the open"
By Ann Mroz
THE 12 November 2009
"Researchers, government and society benefit when research is made freely available, so the sooner it is mandated, the better"

"Learning to share "
By Zoë Corbyn
THE 12 November 2009
"Free, immediate and permanently available research results for all - that's what the open-access campaigners want. Unsurprisingly, the subscription publishers disagree. Zoe Corbyn weighs up the ramifications for journals, while Matthew Reisz asks how books will fare"

In "Open Access is the short-sighted fight" Daniel Lamire [DL] writes:

DL: "(1) If scientific culture rewarded readership and impact above all else, we would not have to force authors toward Open Access."

(a) University hiring and performance evaluation committees do reward impact. (It is no longer true that only publications are counted: their citation impact is counted and rewarded too.)

(b) Soon readership (e.g., download counts, link counts, tags, comments) too will be counted among the metrics of impact, and rewarded -- but this will only become possible once the content itself is Open Access (OA), hence fully accessible online, its impact measurable and rewardable. (See references cited at the end of this commentary under heading METRICS.)

(c) OA mandates do not force authors toward OA -- or no moreso than the universal "publish or perish" mandates force authors toward doing and publishing research: What these mandates do is close the loop between research performance and its reward system.

(d) In the case of OA, it has taken a long time for the world scholarly and scientific community to become aware of the causal connection between OA and research impact (and its rewards), but awareness is at long last beginning to grow. (Stay tuned for the announcement of more empirical findings on the OA impact advantage later today, in honor of OA week.)

DL: "You know full well that many researchers are just happy to have the paper appear in a prestigious journal. They will not make any effort to make their work widely available because they are not rewarded for it. Publishing is enough to receive tenure, grants and promotions. And the reward system is what needs to be fixed."

This is already incorrect: Publishing is already not enough. Citations already count. OA mandates will simply make the causal contingency between access and impact, and between impact and employment/salary/promotion/funding/prizes more obvious and explicit to all. In other words, the reward system will be fixed (including the development and use of a rich and diverse new battery of OA metrics of impact) along with fixing the access system.

DL: "(2) I love peer review. My blog is peer reviewed. You are a peer and just reviewed my blog post."

Peer commentary is not peer review (as surely I -- who founded and edited for a quarter century a rather good peer-reviewed journal that also provided open peer commentary -- ought to be in a position to know!). Peer commentary (as well as post-hoc metrics themselves) are an increasingly important supplement to peer review, but they are themselves neither peer review nor a substitute for it. (Again, see references at the end of this commentary under the heading PEER REVIEW.)

DL: "(3) PLoS has different types of peer review where correctness is reviewed, but no prediction is made as to the perceived importance of the work. Let me quote them:"

“Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them).”

You have profoundly misunderstood this, Daniel:

(i) It is most definitely a part of peer review to evaluate (and where necessary correct) the quality, validity, rigor, originality, relevance, interest and importance of candidates for publication in the journal for which they are refereeing.

(ii) Journals differ in the level of their peer review standards (and with those standards co-vary their acceptance criteria, selectivity, acceptance rates -- and hence their quality and reliability).

(iii) PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine were created explicitly in order to maintain the highest standards of peer review (with acceptance criteria selectivity and acceptance rates at the level of those of Nature and Science [which, by the way, are, like all peer judgments and all human judgment, fallible, but also corrigible post-hoc, thanks to the supplementary scrutiny of peer commentary and follow-up publications)).

(iv) PLoS ONE was created to cater for a lower level in the hierarchy of journal peer review standards. (There is no point citing the lower standards of mid-range journals in that pyramid as if they were representative of peer review itself.)

(vi) Some busy researchers need to know the quality level of a new piece of refereed research a-priori, at point of publication -- before they invest their scarce time in reading it, or, worse, their even scarcer and more precious research time and resources in trying to build upon it -- rather than waiting for months or years of post-hoc peer scrutiny or metrics to reveal it.

(v) Once again: commentary -- and, rarer, peer commentary -- is a supplement, not a substitute for peer review.

DL: "(4) Moreover, PLoS does publish non-peer-reviewed material, see PLoS Currents: Influenza for example."

And the journal hierarchy also includes unrefereed journals at the bottom of the pyramid. Users are quite capable of weighting publications by the quality track-record of their provenance, whether between journals, or between sections of the same journal. Caveat Emptor.

METRICS:

Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S. (2003) Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments. In Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003, pp. 207-220, Trondheim, Norway.

Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research Assessment. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Harnad, S. (2008) Self-Archiving, Metrics and Mandates. Science Editor 31(2) 57-59

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista 4(2).

Harnad, S. (2009) Multiple metrics required to measure research performance. Nature (Correspondence) 457 (785) (12 February 2009)

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) Also in Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. (2007)

Harnad, S; Carr, L; Swan, A; Sale, A & Bosc H. (2009) Maximizing and Measuring Research Impact Through University and Research-Funder Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates. Wissenschaftsmanagement 15(4) 36-41

PEER REVIEW:

Harnad, S. (1978) BBS Inaugural Editorial. Behavioral and Brains Sciences 1(1)

Harnad, S. (ed.) (1982) Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in scientific quality control, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harnad, S. (1984) Commentaries, opinions and the growth of scientific knowledge. American Psychologist 39: 1497 - 1498.

Harnad, Stevan (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science, Technology and Human Values, 10 p.55-62.

Harnad, S. (1986) Policing the Paper Chase. (Review of S. Lock, A difficult balance: Peer review in biomedical publication.) Nature 322: 24 - 5.

Harnad, S. (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.) Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp. 397-414.

Harnad, S. (1996) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Pp 103-118.

Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4) 283-292.

Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.

Harnad, S. (2003/2004) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines. Retour a la tradition orale: ecrire dans le ciel a la vitesse de la pensee. Dans: Salaun, Jean-Michel & Vendendorpe, Christian (dir). Le défi de la publication sur le web: hyperlectures, cybertextes et meta-editions. Presses de l'enssib.

Harnad, S. (2003) BBS Valedictory Editorial. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26(1)