Commentary on: Bailey, Charles (2005, April 26th) "DigitalKoans What Is the Sound of One E-Print Downloading?" http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2005/04/26/how-green-is-my-publisher/
THE LIGHT DOESN'T GET ANY GREENER -- AND NEEDN'T': JUST GO AHEAD AND SELF-ARCHIVE! Stevan Harnad > -- CB: "Here's what I found [for a "green" publisher]. My "preprint > distribution rights" allow "posting as electronic files on the > contributor's own Web site for personal or professional use, or on the > contributor's internal university/corporate intranet or network, or > other external Web site at the contributor's university or institution, > but not for either commercial (for-profit) orsystematic third party > sales or dissemination, by which is meant any interlibrary loan or > document delivery systems. The contributor may update the preprint with > the final version of the article after review and revision by the > journal's editor(s) and/or editorial/peer-review board." That is exactly right for a green publisher: The final, accepted draft may be self-archived in the author's own institutional archive. That's what only 15% of authors are doing today. http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm That's what 100% of authors ought to be doing, to maximize research usage and impact (and ought to have been doing yesterday!). > -- CB: "what if I want to deposit the e-print in a disciplinary > archive like E-LIS or I want to put it in the Internet Archive's > upcoming "OAI-compliant ?universal repository?"?... No way to > immediately deposit the paper in an OAI-PMH compliant archive that will > have a longer life than my Website and that can be harvested by OAI-PMH > search services, such as OAIster." The restrictions on 3rd-party archives are perfectly reasonable and no problem whatsoever at this time. The problem today (just so we keep our eyes on the ball!) is the non-archiving of 85% of articles, hence their inaccessibility to all those would-be users whose universities cannot afford access to the journal's official version! It is cheap and easy for any university to create an OAI-compliant institutional archive, and OAIster can happily harvest the metadata. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse (And worrying about the preservation of non-existent contents is rather putting the cart before the horse. The self-archived OA versions of a goodly portion of the 15% of the articles that have been self-archived in the past 15 years are still online and OA to tell the tale to this day. All their publishers' official versions are too. So fussing about the permanence of the non-contents of cupboards that are in any case meant to be access-supplements, not the official version of record, is rather misplaced, when what is immediately missing and urgently needed is their presence, not their permanence.) > -- CB: "The agreement also states that the e-print must contain a > fair amount of information about the publisher and the paper: the > published article's citation and copyright date, the publisher's > address, information about the publisher's document delivery service, > and a link to the publisher's home page." That's just fine too. It is only good scholarly practice to provide the full reference information and to link to the official version of record for the sake of all those potential users who can afford it. What is wrong with that, and why would any author not want to do that? > -- CB: "First ... "Green" may not always mean "go."" Not a single one of the points raised by CB in any way implies that "green" means anything other than "go." > -- CB: "Second, it would be helpful if [OA Archive] directories > could identify whether articles can be deposited in key types of > archives." They already do. The main distinction is the author's own institutional archive versus central (3rd-party) archives. It is the former that are the critical ones. The rest can be done by metadata harvesting. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?all=yes > -- CB: "Third, if claims are going to made about the number of > "green" journals, maybe more consideration about what "green" means is > in order, and perhaps OA advocates should agree on their color schemes. > Is "can archive pre-print and post-print" enough for "green," or should > it be "can archive pre-print and post-print on the author's Website or > in any noncommercial archive or repository"? If the latter, the heat > should be turned up on publishers that don?t permit it by authors and OA > advocates." The answer is that the former is abundantly enough, and the ones the heat should be turned up on are the authors, to go ahead on green, not the publishers, who have already done as much as it is reasonable or necessary to ask them to do, to allow authors to provide the OA that they purport to need and want so much: Enough, for example, for 34,000 authors to do the keystrokes to sign a petition threatening to boycott publishers that don't make their journal contents OA, but not enough, apparently, to themselves do the keystrokes to make their own articles OA. That, by the way, is the real koan: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3061.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin3-harnad.ppt > -- CB: "Fourth... maybe it's time to tilt at a new windmill: a set > of standardized copyright transfer agreements." No, it's not more windmills or red herrings that researchers, their institutions, their funders, and research itself need right now: What they need is to go ahead and self-archive. Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2005) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org 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-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/