On 2-Dec-08, at 7:08 AM, leo waaijers wrote (on SPARC-OAForum): Dear Stevan,
I will focus on your comments on my Recommendation 1 and leave the judgment on the Recommendations 2 and 3 and your criticism thereon to the readers. So this is about a comparison between a 'mandate to self-archive' and the usage of a 'licence to publish'. Dear Leo, For comparability, it needs to be a comparison between a 'mandate to self-archive' and a 'mandate to successfully adopt a license to publish'. Neither self-archiving nor licensing is being done spontaneously by authors, hence we are talking about mandates in both cases, and the question is (1) for which mandate is it more likely that consensus on adoption will be achieved at all, and (2) what is the likelihood of compliance, if mandated. Moreover, both questions have to be considered separately for funder mandates and for institutional mandates, as funders and institutions have different prerogatives. (Institutional consortia on mandates are yet another category, though at a time when consensus on adopting even individual institutional mandates is still hard to achieve, consortial consensus on mandates seems even more difficult; the analogy with consortial consensus on subscription licensing is, I think, very misleading. Subscription licensing consortia are based on strong shared interests on the part of institutional libraries, and no countervailing interests on the part of institutional authors; author licensing mandates, in contrast, involve the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance.) The reason I think an author licensing mandate has a much higher hurdle to mount is that it raises the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance, whereas author deposit mandates face only the inertia about doing the few extra author keystrokes required -- and both surveys and outcome studies on actual practice show that most authors will comply, willingly. Both tools only apply to the domain of toll-gated publishing where they try to improve the accessibility of publications. It is the copyright owner who decides about the conditions of access and reuse and the toll-gated domain is characterized by many access limitations and conditions that only may be lifted after payment. However, there is an important legal exception to that model; the fair use clause states that these access limitations do not apply for a personal copy. Digital documents that are made freely accessible on the web can be accessed, read on-screen, downloaded, stored, printed-off, and data-crunched by any individual user. (They can also be harvested by harvesters like google.) That is all the use that researchers need, and that is all the use that ("Gratis") OA need provide. In the self-archiving approach the author assigns the full copyrights to a publisher and subsequently utilises the fair use clause to facilitate access to the publication. The licence to publish leaves the copyrights with the author, gives the publisher the right of first publishing and adopts an embargo period for other publishing modes. This is incorrect, I am afraid. In the self-archiving approach, the author makes the article freely accessible online, and the rest comes with the territory. As I said, this is done with the official blessing of the journal for 63% of journals, providing full OA for those articles. For the remaining 37%, the author has the option of depositing in Closed Access and letting users rely on the "email eprint request" button during any publisher embargo. This is "Almost OA" -- and once immediate-deposit mandates are universally adopted, over and above immediately providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA, they will soon usher in 100% OA as a matter of natural course. In my view, it makes no sense at all to delay still further the certainty of providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA (by mandating immediate-deposit), to wait instead and try to adopt a much stronger mandate (mandatory author licensing) for which consensus on adoption is much harder to achieve -- because of the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance -- simply because of the possibility of 37% almost-OA owing to publisher embargoes. 63% OA + 37% almost-OA is already fully within reach and long overdue. We should not delay grasping it for one minute longer, in quest of something stronger yet not now within rich and far less certain. The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html (Note that there can be -- and are -- stronger self-archiving mandates than ID/OA, but that ID/OA is the default option, the mandate for which consensus on adoption is most easily achieved and all legal concerns are completely mooted. If success can be achieved on adopting a stronger mandate -- such as Immediate Deposit/Immediate-OA, or a 6-month cap on embargoes, or Immediate Deposit plus Author Licensing with Opt-Out -- then by all means adopt the stronger mandate. But on no account delay the adoption of the weaker, certain mandate that is already within immediate reach, in order to hold out for a stronger, uncertain mandate that is not! For a fair comparison of the two tools, let's assume that in both cases an institutional mandate applies. I am afraid that that is not at all a fair comparison, because it presupposes (a) that consensus on adopting the mandate is equally probable in both cases, weaker and stronger, and that (b) compliance is equally probable in both cases, weaker and stronger. Neither of these assumptions is correct because of the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance. Neither handicap is shared by the weakest, easiest and surest IDOA mandate, which is only about keystrokes, and already fully within all institutions' immediate rich. When it comes to mandating self-archiving, the only party involved is the author. That makes such a mandate relatively easy of course. But it also has a high price. Open Access remains to the publisher's discretion. The weakest mandate is always relatively the easiest, but it is infinitely preferable to no mandate at all, and to continued delay and debate instead about stronger mandates. Let the weaker mandates be adopted universally, now, and then let's debate about strengthening them! What the ID/OA guarantees, immediately, is 63% OA + 37% almost-OA. Every day we keep delaying and speculating about stronger mandates, less certain of consensus and compliance, we are simply losing yet another day of 63% OA + 37% almost-OA, needlessly, after already having allowed years and years of needless delay, and needlessly lost research access, progress and impact. Currently that's a complete mess. Publishers' policies vary widely when it comes to permitting access to different versions (pre-print, post-print, pdf) for different uses (author's web site, institutional window, educational usage, commercial usage) after different embargo periods. In the meantime for personal copies an end user may use the request button in the same way as she uses the SFX button of her library. (Why not combine the two buttons?). Under the circumstances the request button is a smart invention. Kudos for you! (1) The variation in publisher policy is completely described and covered by 63% OA + 37% almost-OA for OA's target content: the peer-reviewed postprint. (For the preprint, the figure is even higher; and the publisher's proprietary PDF is completely irrelevant.) (2) The SFX button is only for licensed (i.e., toll-gated) content for institutional-internal users. The "email eprint request" ("Almost-OA") Button is for all IR-deposited content, worldwide, for any user. There is a world of difference there (and again, the institutional-library subscription-licensing perspective is profoundly misleading, just as it is with the analogy of multi-institution subscription-licensing consortia.) When an institution considers mandating the usage of the licence to publish they should involve the publishers as well. It would be unfair just to issue such a mandate and leave the authors to the mercy of the publishers. (a) Institutions' employees, and funders' fundees can be mandated, but publishers cannot: They are not within employers' and funders remits. (b) A big funding agency like NIH might be in a position to invite publishers to the table, and to apply their clout, but individual universities certainly cannot. (c) Institutional library consortia have clout on subscription licensing agreements, but author licensing is another matter, and involves another party: authors. (d) Meanwhile, authors would indeed be left "to the mercy of their publishers" (because of the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance) if individual institutions adopted the stronger author licensing mandates without prior successful consortial negotiations. (e) So let's go ahead and adopt the weaker IDOA mandate that is already within universal reach, at no risk to the author; and let's pursue stronger mandates thereafter, rather than delaying OA still longer, this late in the day, to hold out for a possible future stronger-mandate? It's my guess that negotiations with publishers may not be prospectless. A common interest, not only for authors and their institutions but also for (some) publishers is to raise their social and academic profile and clear the operational situation. In order to have a stronger position institutions should combine their efforts in (national) consortiums. By the way, I allready know of several occasions where a publisher (including Elsevier and even Wiley) has published articles without the copyrights being transferred to them. (i) It is not at all evident that the interests in and benefits from OA to authors, institutions and funders are matched by corresponding interests and benefits to publishers! (ii) But by all means, if such consortial negotiations are "not prospectless," pursue them: But not at the price failing to grasp what is already immediately within reach, which is individual institutional (and funder) Green OA self-archiving mandates. (iii) (The occasional individual exception to copyright transfer that has been accommodated for decades by publishers is not the same as a blanket acceptance of universal copyright retention.) To conclude. Indeed, in the toll gated domain I prefer mandating the usage of the licence to publish over mandating of self-archiving. The first option involves a higher commitment of the institutions which makes it tougher of course. But the operational result is much clearer and better sustainable. It is fine to prefer to have a stronger benefit rather than a weaker one if both are within reach and you have a choice; but it is certainly not fine to fail to grasp a weaker benefit that is already fully within reach in order to hold out for a stronger but much less certain benefit that is not yet within reach. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. Stevan Harnad Stevan Harnad wrote: On 1-Dec-08, at 5:55 AM, leo waaijers wrote (in SPARC-OAForum: Dear Stevan, Most authors do not self-archive their publications spontaneously. So they must be mandated. But, apart from a few, the mandators do not mandate the authors. In a world according to you they themselves must be supermandated. And so on. This approach only works if somewhere in the mandating hierarchy there is an enlightened echelon that is able and willing to start the mandating cascade. Leo, you are quite right that in order to induce authors to provide Green OA, their institutions and funders must be induced to mandate that they provide Green OA (keystrokes). Authors can be mandated by their institutions and funders, but institutions and funders cannot be mandated (except possibly by their governments and tax-payers), so how to persuade them to mandate the keystrokes? The means that I (and others) have been using to persuade institutions and funders to mandate that authors provide OA have been these: (1) Benefits of Providing OA: Gather empirical evidence to demonstrate the benefits of OA to the author, institution, and funder, as well as to research progress and to tax-paying society (increased accessibility, downloads, uptake, citations, hence increased research impact, productivity, and progress, increased visibility and showcasing for institutions, richer and more valid research performance evaluation for research assessors, enhanced and more visible metrics of research impact -- and its rewards -- for authors, etc.). (2) Means of Providing OA: Provide free software for making deposit quick, easy, reliable, functional, and cheap, for authors as well as their institutions. Provide OA metrics to monitor, measure and reward OA and OA-generated research impact. (3) Evidence that Mandating (and Only Mandating) Works: Gather empirical data to demonstrate that (a) most authors (> 80%) will deposit willingly if it is mandated by their institutions and/or funders, but they will not deposit if it is not mandated (< 15%) (Alma Swan's studies); and that (b) most authors (> 80%) actually do what they say they would do (deposit if it is mandated [> 80%] and don't deposit if it is not mandated [< 15%] even if they are given incentives and assistance [< 30%] (Arthur Sale's Studies). (4) Information about OA: Information and evidence about the means and the benefits of providing OA has to be widely and relentlessly provided, in conferences, publications, emails, discussion lists, and blogs. At the same time, misunderstanding and misinformation have to be unflaggingly corrected (over and over and over!) There are already 58 institutional and funder Green OA mandates adopted and at least 11 proposed and under consideration. So these efforts are not entirely falling on deaf ears (although I agree that 58 out of perhaps 10,000 research institutions [plus funders] worldwide -- or even the top 4000 -- is still a sign of some hearing impairment! But the signs are that audition is improving...) To create such a cascade one needs water (i.e. arguments) and a steep rocky slope (i.e. good conditions). The pro OA arguments do not seem to be the problem. In all my discussions over the last decade authors, managers and librarians alike agreed that the future should be OA also thanks to you, our driving OA archevangelist. But alas it is not agreement that we need, but mandates (and keystrokes)! And now, not in some indeterminate future. So, it must be the conditions that are lacking. This awareness brought me to the writing of an article about these failing conditions. Only if we are able to create better conditions mandates will emerge and be successful on a broad scale. A fortiori, this will make mandates superfluous. I am one of the many admirers of your splendid efforts and success in the Netherlands, with SURF/Dare, "Cream of Science," and much else. But I am afraid I don't see how the three recommendations made in the Ariadne article will make mandates emerge (nor how they make mandates superfluous). On the contrary, I see the challenge of making the three recommendations prevail to be far, far greater than the challenge of getting mandates to be adopted. Let me explain: Recommendation 1: Transferring the copyright in a publication has become a relic of the past; nowadays a "licence to publish" is sufficient. The author retains the copyrights. Institutions should make the use of such a licence part of their institutional policy. Persuading authors to retain copyright is a far bigger task than just persuading them to deposit (keystrokes): It makes them worry about what happens if their publisher does not agree to copyright retention, and then their article fails to be published in their journal of choice. Doing the c. 6-minutes-worth of keystrokes that it takes to deposit an article -- even if authors can't be bothered to do those keystrokes until/unless it is mandated -- is at least a sure thing, and that's the end of it. In contrast, it is not at all clear how long copyright retention negotiations will take in each case, nor whether they will succeed in each case. Moreover, just as authors are not doing the deposit keystrokes except if mandated, they are not doing the copyright retention negotiations either: Do you really think it would be easier to mandate doing copyright retention than to mandate deposit? (Harvard has adopted a kind of a copyright-retention mandate, though it has an opt-out, so it is not clear whether it is quite a mandate -- nor is it clear how well it will succeed, either in terms of compliance or in terms of negotiation [nor whether it is even thinkable for universities with authors that have less clout with their publishers than Harvard's]. But there is a simple way to have the best of both worlds by upgrading the Harvard copyright-retention mandate with opt-out into a deposit mandate without opt-out that is certain to succeed, and generalizable to all universities -- the Harvards as well as the Have-Nots. To require successful copyright renegotiation as a precondition for providing OA and for mandating OA, however, would be needlessly and arbitrarily to raise the goal-post far higher than it need be -- and already is for persuading institutions and funders to mandate deposit at all.) Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/364-guid.html Recommendation 2: The classic impact factor for a journal is not a good yardstick for the prestige of an author. Modern digital technology makes it possible to tailor the measurement system to the author. Institutions should, when assessing scientists and scholars, switch to this type of measurement and should also promote its further development. This is certainly true, but how does using these potential new impact metrics generate OA or OA mandates, or make OA mandates superfluous? On the contrary, it is OA (and whatever successfully generates OA) that will generate these new metrics (which will, among other things, in turn serve to increase research impact, as well as making it more readily measurable and rewardable)! 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). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14418/ Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. 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. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13804/ Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15619/ Recommendation 3: The traditional subscription model for circulating publications is needlessly complex and expensive. Switching to Open Access, however, requires co-ordination that goes beyond the level of individual institutions. Supra-institutional organisations, for example the European University Association, should take the necessary initiative. The European University Association has already taken the initiative to recommend that its 791 member universities in 46 countries should all mandate Green OA self-archiving! Now the individual universities need to be persuaded to follow that recommendation. The European Heads of Research Councils have made the same recommendation to their member research councils. (I am optimistic, because, for example, 6 of the 7 RCUK research funding councils have so far already followed the first of these recommendations -- from the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology. And the 28 universities that have already mandates show that institutional mandates are at last gathering momentum too. But if it is already considerably harder to mandate author copyright-retention than it is to mandate author self-archiving in their institutional repositories (Green OA), it is surely yet another order of magnitude harder to mandate "Switching to Open Access" from the "traditional subscription model." If author's are likely to resist having to renegotiate copyright with their journal of choice at the risk of not getting published in their journal of choice, just in order to provide OA, they are even more likely to resist having to publish in a Gold OA journal instead of in their journal of choice, just in order to provide OA. And journal publishers are likely to resist anyone trying to dictate their economic model to them. (Moreover, this goes beyond the bounds of what is within the university community's mandate to mandate!) So mandating Green OA is still the fastest, surest, and simplest way to reach universal OA. Let us hope that the "enlightened echelon" of the institutional hierarchy will now set in motion the long overdue "mandating cascade." Best wishes, Stevan Harnad