On Saturday, July 31, 2004 [identity deleted] wrote: > I am apprehensive about strident Open Access advocacy.
There is still too little that is concrete happening yet, but with UK and US governments committees recommending mandating OA self-archiving, this cannot be described as strident OA advocacy. (We had strident OA advocacy 10 years ago. This is sober contemplation of policy.) http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/congress.html http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ > The report in the Scientist is guarded and NIH is certainly > unlikely to be coercive. The report in the Scientist, and most of the other press reports, stress OA publishing, which it would indeed be unrealistic to imagine that the US House Appropriations Committee, NIH, or the UK Select Committee could or would mandate. Nor is that what they are recommending be mandated. They are recommending to mandate that research funded by them should be made OA by being self-archived by its authors, as a condition for receiving funding. If this sounds coercive, consider that there is already a far bigger component of "coercion" in all research funding -- and indeed in employment by all research institutions: The implicit mandate is that the fundee's or employee's research findings must be made public through publication. This mandate is so pervasive that it is often not even formulated explicitly, though its existence is known as "publish or perish." Researchers are not free to do their research and then put it into a desk-drawer and move on to the next piece of research. Or, rather, if they do elect to do only that, chances are that their next piece of research will not be funded, and they may have difficulties staying employed at their research institution. The expectation that research findings must be made accessible to would-be users is so entrenched in the very concept of research that we forget that the "publish or perish" contingency is necessary in order to ensure that researchers do the right thing -- in the interests of both themselves and research itself. For otherwise they are indeed prone by (human) nature to want to move from one piece of learned inquiry to the next without troubling either to answer to the scrutiny of peer review or to make their results known. (These days, in our online age, if there were no publish-or-perish incentive, researchers' natural inclination would no doubt be simply to put their unrefereed findings on the Web instead of a desk-drawer, for it is not so much a disinclination to make them public that causes the inertia, but the fact that being answerable to peer review is something of a chore, and one that a busy -- or lazy -- researcher would just as soon skip, if he could.) So coercion there already is, universally. What is being recommended is simply to update the existing publish-or-perish mandate to fit the newfound potential of the online age: Maximise the usage and impact of your peer-reviewed publications by making them openly accessible to all would-be users, not just those whose institutions can afford to pay for the journal in which it happens to appear -- by self-archiving them all on the web. (The same thing would have been said to researchers at the onset of the print age if, counterfactually, refereed journals had predated print, in the hand-written and hand-circulated manuscript era: Maximize the usage and impact of your peer-reviewed publications by making them publicly accessible to all would-be users who can afford it, by publishing them in print, not just circulating the hand-written version. Indeed, there is a deeper analogy here, if we consider the potential role of the web in updating and optimising the existing practise of requesting and mailing of author reprints!) Moreover, the already "coercive" element by which publish-or-perish can and will be generalised to "publish and maximise access webwide" is also already implicit in how publish-or-perish has evolved in the past few decades: For it is no longer just "publish and we will count the publications" when it comes to promotion, salary, or research refunding. Evaluation already takes the *impact* of each publication into account too, weighting quantity with importance. This weighting used to be derived from the established peer-review quality-standards and impact-factor of the journal by which the article was accepted, but these days it is also increasingly based on the specific individual author and article citation counts. So the instruments of "coercion" -- which are better thought of as incentives for performance and productivity -- are already in place: Promotion, salary, and research funding are already conditional on research impact. OA maximises research impact. So these rewards (chief among them being the magnitude of one's contribution to knowledge) are already conditional on OA. It is just that most researchers don't realize it yet, because it is still too new, and the causal contingencies are not yet known and understood. Maximising research access maximises research impact. This is the principle that can and will (and should) induce research employers and funders to mandate that their researchers do the right thing, for themselves, for their employers and funders, and for research itself: Maximise the usage and impact of your research both by peer-reviewing/publishing it, and by providing OA to that publication, by self-archiving it publicly for all its would-be users webwide. This is the only upgrade of the existing "coercion" that is being recommended, for the sake of research productivity and progress itself. > Government diktats can become difficult. This is not a government diktat. It is merely one of the (many) conditions on receiving research funding from the government. > The correct approach is to enhance the open archives initiative > and persuade scientists to join the movement. There is a decade of history (and centuries of human nature) to suggest that waiting for OA to be provided voluntarily, without any cost/benefit contingencies, would be like employing or funding researchers unconditionally, without any cost/benefit contingencies based on outcome. If we want research productivity and progress to be maximised now, rather than whenever researchers elect to get around to it, the cost/benefit contingencies must be implemented now. Otherwise research impact continues to be lost, needlessly, in an online era that can at last remedy this longstanding access problem, just as print remedied its precursor, in its day. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif > There are technical issues involved in archive generation and maintenance > which will be hard to solve at all institutions. The technical part is not hard, but if there are unaffiliated researchers or researchers whose institutions cannot manage it, there already exist several central archives to take care of such overflow, and more of them can be created cheaply and easily. Surely the substantial benefits of maximising impact for us all are not to be held up by the slight added complexity for a small minority of cases? (Moreover, it is mandated self-archiving that is most likely to induce Necessity to mother Invention, generating still more of the requisite resources and incentives for archive generation and maintenance.) > Open Access is not an issue which seems to bother practicing scientists > since the amount of accessible literature is already too vast to be > read and digested in most fields. This is unfortunately the expression of two familiar misunderstandings about both the online medium and OA: "Info-Glut" and "Sitting Pretty" http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#4.Navigation http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#29.Sitting The two can be encapsulated as: "There is already too much out there to access, and I can already access more than enough of it." There are two profound problems with this: (1) It implies that access-tolls are the optimal way to decide who accesses what. (Does the web not offer more rational ways to direct and filter navigation than merely to base it on the current ability to pay for access to a given journal?) (2) The user view is not the only pertinent one: Do I want my research output's usage and impact to be directed and filtered -- and restricted -- by would-be users' institutions' current ability or inability to pay for access to a given journal? There are 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, publishing 2.5 million articles per year. Current online navigational power is more than enough to rationally navigate all that. It is already the way we navigate it, through online indexes, but those contain only each article's metadata: Access to the full-texts depends on our institution's ability to pay the tolls. There is no reason the full-texts should not be accessible toll-free too. Both authors and users would be far better off if they were -- and so would research itself. > I do not subscribe to the view that our collective impact will > improve in an open access utopia. Fortunately, that is not a utopic view, but an already demonstrated empirical fact: We have so far reported the OA impact-enhancement results in Physics (same results, reported in 3 places): Brody, T., Stamerjohanns, H., Vallieres, F., Harnad, S. Gingras, Y., & Oppenheim, C. (2004) The effect of Open Access on Citation Impact. Presented at: National Policies on Open Access (OA) Provision for University Research Output: an International meeting, Southampton, 19 February 2004. http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/OATAnew.pdf Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html Longer version: The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/impact.html Harnad, S. & Brody, T. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine 10 (6) June http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html Others have reported similar findings in computer science, astrophysics, and mathematics: Kurtz, Michael J.; Eichhorn, Guenther; Accomazzi, Alberto; Grant, Carolyn S.; Demleitner, Markus; Murray, Stephen S.; Martimbeau, Nathalie; Elwell, Barbara. (2003) The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Sociology, Bibliometrics, and Impact. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasis-abstract.html Kurtz, M.J. (2004) Restrictive access policies cut readership of electronic research journal articles by a factor of two, Michael J. Kurtz, Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19oa/kurtz.pdf Lawrence, S. (2001) Online or Invisible? Nature 411 (6837): 521. http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/ Odlyzko, A.M. (2002) The rapid evolution of scholarly communication." Learned Publishing 15: 7-19 http://www.catchword.com/alpsp/09531513/v15n1/contp1-1.htm > I think the issue is that high journal costs have resulted in a fight > between publishers and customers (scientists and librarians) in which the > latter are using the "politically correct" position that publicly funded > research results must be freely available. There is an element of truth in this, because the journal affordability problem and the research access/impact problem have often been conflated (i.e., treated as if they were the same problem, or as if the solution to one was also the solution to the other). This is one of the reasons so many people wrongly think that OA = OA Journal Publishing. Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html But the US and UK mandates in question are not about OA publishing [the golden road to OA] but about OA provision, by authors, through self-archiving [the green road to OA]. 5% percent of journals are gold (exact): http://www.doaj.org/alpha?alpha=ALL 84% of journals are green (sampled): http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php The green road is not taken in order to make journals more affordable; it is taken in order to make all articles more accessible to their would-be users. It has nothing to do with the fight between publishers and customers about journal pricing. > It is surprising that this high moral ground was not thought of > earlier. There is great danger in soliciting government diktats. This is not about moral ground but about maximising research usage and impact. Nor is it about government diktats but about maximising the usage and impact of government-funded research -- maximising the return on tax-payers' investments. Stevan Harnad UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org