Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Below is a comment on an article in Wired entitled Open-Access Journals Flourish (by Randy Dotinga) http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67174,00.html?tw=wn_2culthead which (as usual) described only the gold rush and completely overlooked the quiet growth of green: There are two roads to Open Access (i.e., free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles), one of them being the golden road of publishing the articles in gold journals that give away their own contents for free online by charging the author-institution for publication instead of charging the user-institution for access. Your article rightly points out that about 5% of journals (about 1500 out of a total of about 24,000) are already gold today. What it did not mention was that about 92% of journals are already green, that is, they give their own authors the green light to make their own articles Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them in their own institution's Open Access Archives. Of the 2.5 million articles published annually today, 5% are OA via gold and 15% are OA via green. The exact comparative growth rate of Gold vs. Green OA is not yet known, but it is far easier and cheaper for an institution to create an OA archive for its own research than it is to create a new gold journal (or to convert an established journal or publisher to gold), especially with more and more research institutions, universities, research funders and governments recommending, requesting and even requiring that the peer-reviewed research articles they produce and fund should be made accessible to all their would-be users online and not just to those whose institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journals in which they were published. Here are a few URLs that fill in the relative gold and green portions of the picture that your Wired Story wrongly portrayed as a unilateral Gold Rush: Directory of OA (Gold) Journals (1525/24,000): http://www.doaj.org/ Directory of Green Journal Policies (7753/8427): http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Number and Growth Rate of Institutional OA Archives: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse Policy Recommendation of UK Select Committee: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm Policy Recommendation of Berlin Declaration: http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html Registry of Institutional Self-Archiving Policies: http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php OA Self-Archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ Bibliography on how maximizing research access maximizes research impact: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html American Scientist Open Access Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, Université du Québec à Montréal Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of Southampton, UK
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Gold journals use various business models and are in no way limited to the author-institution charge mentioned below. A good counter-example is Scielo (http://www.scielo.org) where the journals are simply and directly subsidized by governmental money on a macro scale, and not on a per-article basis. Jean-Claude Guédon Le lundi 11 avril 2005 à 13:06 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Below is a comment on an article in Wired entitled Open-Access Journals Flourish (by Randy Dotinga) http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67174,00.html?tw=wn_2culthead which (as usual) described only the gold rush and completely overlooked the quiet growth of green: There are two roads to Open Access (i.e., free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles), one of them being the golden road of publishing the articles in gold journals that give away their own contents for free online by charging the author-institution for publication instead of charging the user-institution for access. Your article rightly points out that about 5% of journals (about 1500 out of a total of about 24,000) are already gold today. What it did not mention was that about 92% of journals are already green, that is, they give their own authors the green light to make their own articles Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them in their own institution's Open Access Archives. Of the 2.5 million articles published annually today, 5% are OA via gold and 15% are OA via green. The exact comparative growth rate of Gold vs. Green OA is not yet known, but it is far easier and cheaper for an institution to create an OA archive for its own research than it is to create a new gold journal (or to convert an established journal or publisher to gold), especially with more and more research institutions, universities, research funders and governments recommending, requesting and even requiring that the peer-reviewed research articles they produce and fund should be made accessible to all their would-be users online and not just to those whose institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journals in which they were published. Here are a few URLs that fill in the relative gold and green portions of the picture that your Wired Story wrongly portrayed as a unilateral Gold Rush: Directory of OA (Gold) Journals (1525/24,000): http://www.doaj.org/ Directory of Green Journal Policies (7753/8427): http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Number and Growth Rate of Institutional OA Archives: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse Policy Recommendation of UK Select Committee: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm Policy Recommendation of Berlin Declaration: http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html Registry of Institutional Self-Archiving Policies: http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php OA Self-Archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ Bibliography on how maximizing research access maximizes research impact: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html American Scientist Open Access Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, Université du Québec à Montréal Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of Southampton, UK
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Rick Anderson wrote: My question remains: do we want to encourage the development of Gold journals? If not, if the existence of Gold journals doesn't really matter, then I guess there's not an issue in my mind. Yes, we should continue to encourage the development of Gold journals. As one of the people who originally proposed the author-institution cost-recovery model already a decade ago Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis? Serials Review 21(1) 70-72 (Reprinted in Managing Information 2(3) 1995) http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/1691/00/harnad95.quo.vadis.html I can hardly be described as discouraging Gold journals! But I definitely discourage the vastly disproportionate emphasis they are getting today. Our efforts with Gold journals should be roughly in proportion to their potential for immediate OA returns, which is about 5% today. The remaining 95% of our efforts should be on Green self-archiving, with its far higher immediate OA potential. Yet for several years the actual proportions have been closer to the reverse. Only very recently (with the growing realization that OA self-archiving can be mandated by authors' funders and institutions, whereas OA publishing cannot) are we at last beginning to redress the imbalance, although the current balance -- I'd guess it's about 50/50 today -- is *still* not optimal, insofar as the interests and prospects of immediate OA are concerned. Once the OA movement itself began gaining momentum, it was a mistake, and it needlessly lost us time and progress, to have gone almost exclusively for Gold, as we have done now for several years. However, whereas we ought now to be putting most of our efforts into Green (as we should have been doing from the outset), it is still important to go ahead and keep testing Gold too, in all four of its variant forms ([1] retaining the user-institution-end toll-based cost-recovery, but making the online version free, immediately, or [2] within 6-12 months and [3] testing the author-institution-end cost-recovery model, fully, and also in [4] the hybrid optional form proposed by Tom Walker in 1998 at the outset of this Forum, and now offered by National Academy of Sciences, Springer, and others.) The prospect of an eventual transition to Gold is only a hypothesis (whereas the feasibility of immediate 100% OA via Green is a certainty). But the ground for the *possibility* of an eventual transition from Green to Gold can and should be prepared and tested now (using 5% of our efforts and resources), in parallel with 95% of our efforts and resources being focussed on generating immediate OA via Green self-archiving. Trying instead to go directly from the status quo to 100% Gold OA is a nonstarter -- practically, logically, economically and motivationally. Most publishers are quite justifiably uninterested in taking such a risk with an untested cost-recovery model. However, they have not (and they could not have) opposed OA itself. Hence 92% of journals are already Green on author self-archiving (but now the ball is in their authors' court, to prove they are really willing to do what it takes to get the OA they claim to want and need so much). So Green is the sure road to at least 92% immediate OA, if only we concentrate our efforts on it. Meanwhile, the Gold road can continue to be tested, to prepare for the *possibility* of an eventual transition from Green to Gold one day. Whether there will ever be a need for that transition -- rather than peaceful co-existence, with the self-archived author's online OA version merely supplementing the journal's version for those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford it -- is merely hypothetical. But that there is an immediate need for 100% OA today is not at all hypothetical; nor is its reachability via Green. (I stand by my original statement -- that authors will tend to publish in the venue that they think will give them the most prestige, regardless of whether it will give them the most readers -- but then, based on several things you've said during this exchange, you don't seem to actually disagree with that statement. It's almost as if you've gotten lost in a labyrinth of reflexive argumentation, and have lost sight of the question that instigated the exchange...) Nope, not lost in the least! We should be devoting 95% effort to OA via Green and 5% via Gold, for the reasons just described. The *reason* we need OA at all, however, is that it maximizes research usage and impact (by maximizing potential readership). You had expressed doubt that authors want/need to maximize their potential readership, if it means a trade-off with journal prestige. That would in and of itself have amounted to an expression of doubt that authors want/need OA (if Gold were the only option)! So the way you found yourself in that awkward position was by focusing only on the Golden road to OA, ignoring the Green road, and
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On 14-Dec-04, at 5:13 PM, Rick Anderson wrote: This is the part I don't get. If we're fooling ourselves to think that there's anything particularly attractive to authors about publishing in a Gold journal, then why is it a given that we should encourage and support the development of Gold journals? If Green is good enough for authors, readers and publishers, then what's the point of fostering Gold? There are situations where considering open access publishing (the Gold road) simply makes the most sense. For example, when there is no profit involved and a journal is subsidized (which is not unusual), then the difference between OA and non-OA publishing is that OA costs less (no authentication system and support for same, no subscription tracking if electronic only). Here, there are clearcut economic as well as impact advantages. When new journals are being started, particularly when the impetus comes from academia rather than the publishing industry, it just makes sense to consider OA publishing as the way of the future. For well-established journals and publishers, green policies, making as much material openly accessible, and well-thought-out OA experiments do make sense. In other words, the best road to open access depends on your starting point. If you are starting a new electronic-only journal in a third world country and your concerns are impact both for your journal and your authors, and you have no expectation of profit, open access publishing just makes sens. If you are a well-established publisher, a preference for policies allowing for self-archiving and experimenting with new OA business models is perfectly understandable. In this context, it seems that almost everyone in academia and the publishing community are more or less moving towards open access, albeit in slightly different ways. cheers, Heather G. Morrison Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network Phone: 604-268-7001 Fax: 604-291-3023 Email: heath...@eln.bc.ca Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Dear Rick, I generally place much more emphasis on gold OA Journals than Stevan does. Even I do not see how the percentage of journals that were OA Journals could initially increase by more than 5% to 10% each year, including both the change in existing journals and the replacement of conventional journals by new OA journals. What would be needed to go faster would be generalized academic consensus on how to transfer the necessary funds. I myself think such a transfer would not be that difficult to implement, but we are not dealing with one person, but with all the universities, research institutes, and funding bodies world-wide. I think such agreement most unlikely, given the nature of these institutions, however much I wish it otherwise. It is possible that it might be publishers who would initiate the conversion, and might therefore drive it faster. Considering that the publishers the most open to the idea regard a change of one single journal a year as a major event, I think rapid progress even less likely, however much I wish it otherwise. I think such a conversion will eventually be necessary, because I do not see how the cost spiral of conventionally-paid journals can be avoided, and experience shows the yet smaller likelihood of libraries receiving sufficient funding to cope. This spiral had been present in the past without green OA, and will continue in the future, regardless of green OA. All that I ask of green OA is that it keep general free access open until we can do the whole system better. As I said, Stevan obviously thinks more of green OA than just that. But we do not have to agree about the best future direction to agree that the best present direction -- indeed the only practical present direction -- for us to have OA is to get the fundamentally rather modest change to green accomplished now -- it's almost the end of 2004, so I will suggest we aim at 100% by the end of 2005. Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University dgood...@liu.edu -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tue 12/14/2004 9:37 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Rick Anderson wrote: My question remains: do we want to encourage the development of Gold journals? If not, if the existence of Gold journals doesn't really matter, then I guess there's not an issue in my mind. Yes, we should continue to encourage the development of Gold journals. As one of the people who originally proposed the author-institution cost-recovery model already a decade ago Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis? Serials Review 21(1) 70-72 (Reprinted in Managing Information 2(3) 1995) http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/1691/00/harnad95.quo.vadis.html I can hardly be described as discouraging Gold journals! But I definitely discourage the vastly disproportionate emphasis they are getting today. ... Stevan Harnad
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
This will be my last attempt to drag the conversation back to the issue I've been hoping we could discuss (as opposed to the question of whether it's okay to discuss it); if this one doesn't work, I'll have to give up. (Is that the faint sound of cheering I hear?): Stevan Harnad wrote: the reason Rick keeps getting stuck in this one-sided choice between (1a) maximizing prestige and (1b) maximizing readership is that he thinks (1) Gold is the only OA option, or an option that somehow can and should be weighed independently of the other OA option, which is (2) Green. (1) No, I do not believe that Gold is the only option. (2) Yes, I do believe that it can (and must) be weighed independently of the Green option -- at least, if you're planning to start up an OA journal and start competing for authors with other journal publishers. Let me hazard an analogy: if I want to drive from Reno to Los Angeles, my primary options are two: I can take I-395 south through Carson City and Bishop, or I can take I-80 west over the mountains, then south on I-5. Both of those roads exist, and while I'm planning the trip I should consider both of them. But when I embark, I'm going to have to choose between the two. To suggest that the I-395 option cannot or should not be weighed separately from the I-80 option is silly, and will not help me get where I'm trying to go. The two roads are not complementary sides of a single coin; they are mutually exclusive options between which I must choose. The marketplace can have both Green and Gold journals in it, of course, but no single journal can be both Green and Gold. (The same is not true of readership and prestige. A publication can simultaneously have high readership and low prestige, or vice versa.) I'm trying to look at this from the perspective of a publisher that wants to establish a new Gold journal. How will that journal compete for authors in a marketplace that gives authors other choices (especially if the publisher plans to charge authors for the privilege of publishing in its new journal)? Saying authors will choose the Gold journal because it will have lots of readers is insufficient. To the degree that authors want readers, it is primarily as a means to the end of greater prestige, and most authors will happily submit their articles to toll-access journals (despite the access barriers they place before readers) if doing so will net them higher prestige. High-prestige, toll-access journals may be Green, of course, and when they are that's wonderful. But do we actually want to see new Gold journals emerge? If not, then I have nothing more to say on the matter; let's encourage all journals to choose the Green road and forget about the Gold one. But if we do want to see new Gold journals, what can be done to help them compete for authors with established, prestigious toll-access journals? I believe that publishers of OA journals face some unique challenges in that regard, and I've detailed those in the article I mentioned earlier. Offering an author lots of readers is fine, but we're fooling ourselves if we think that high readership is the author's ultimate goal and that she will automatically prefer an OA publishing forum simply because it minimizes barriers to access. And by the way: are you suggesting that all 2.5 million articles currently published in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals could be rechanneled to just 1 of those 24,000 journals? No? No. I'm suggesting that the relatively small number of OA journals has no effect on any individual author's ability to submit an article to one of those journals. You can defend the idea that there's only room in those journals for 5% of the articles in the general marketplace, but your assertion that 95% of authors today have no option *but* to publish in a non-OA journal is what doesn't make sense. (Which 95%? Am I one of them? How would I know if I were?) Jim Till wrote: Two questions: 1) Which are the top three journals in which to publish articles about OA? 2) Of these, which ones are of a hue of green such that they permit self-archiving of the final peer-reviewed, accepted and edited version of the article? Jim Till University of Toronto David Spurrett wrote: Serials Review is a peer-reviewed journal. American libraries does not appear to be peer-reviewed at all, although I'm not certain that it isn't. It looks a lot like a trade magazine from its web page. That's right -- but it's beside the point, if we believe that all an academic author cares about is attracting lots of readers. AL offers many more readers than SR. If an author in the library field really just wants to maximize users, she will write for whatever publication will offer her the most readers. In fact, she may well bypass the formal publishing system altogether and simply post her article to a website, throw in some good metadata tags and mention it in a few carefully-selected discussion
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Sun, 12 Dec 2004, Jan Velterop wrote: Economic viability, sustainability and scalability don't need to be shown. The only thing that needs to be shown is 'cultural' acceptance in the research community. Or even just in the funder community, which will do fine. Economic viability and sustainability will follow. I of course agree that OA journals do not need to show their economic viability, sustainability and scalability in advance in order to be created by OA publishers and used by authors and readers. I said economic viability, sustainability and scalability need to be shown before non-OA publishers (95%) will consider converting to OA. But self-archiving carries risks for those publishers, too. Even though your stock-in-trade answer is that such risk is 'counterfactual', given what happened so far in the high energy physics field. However, just as in investment banking, past performance is a poor indicator of future results. I never say self-archiving carries no risk for publishers. I always say it carries far less risk than converting to OA publishing (until its economic viability, sustainability and scalability have been shown). The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3378.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/greenroad.html shNow, because only about 5% of the total 24,000 peer-reviewed shjournals have taken the risk of trying the OA cost-recovery model shtoday, it follows that only about 5% of articles can be published shin an OA journal today, even if the author, undeterred by the shauthor-institution publication cost (as, I agree, he should not shbe, if the journal is otherwise suitable) wishes to publish in shan OA journal. This is a logical flaw that presumes that paperflow is always static, from journal to journal, and that there can be no shift in submissions from one journal to another. It is plausible that not all articles at the moment can find an appropriate OA journal to be published in, but the implied proportionality to the number of journals in your argument is wrong. I agree that there can and should (and will) be a reduction in the total number of journals (with or without OA). And I agree that the 5% OA journals that exist now could probably publish 10% perhaps even 20% of current articles (if authors prefer to submit there). But the fundamental point is that there are no suitable OA journals for at least 80% of the literature today, and no inclination on the part of the non-OA journals in which those articles appear to convert to the OA cost-recovery model. (Nor, let's face it, is there as yet such a pressing author demand for OA journals! Authors sign petitions for OA, but they do little else, even though OA is for their benefit, and they ought to! Three times as many authors self-archive for OA (15%) as publish in OA journals (5%), but that total of 20% still doesn't amount to a hill of beans; and if I were a non-OA publisher trying to find evidence that OA is not all it's cracked up to be, and that perhaps researchers don't really want it after all, *that* is the evidence I would use! Fortunately, there is a good deal of counter-evidence, and the main missing element is researcher awareness of the strong causal connection between OA and impact. Once that evidence is wider known and better understood, researchers will be more ready to provide OA and their institutions and funders more ready to mandate that they do so, for their mutual good! [Using data on correlations between research impact and research funding, as well as between research impact and researchers' salary, I shall soon be translating the OA impact-advantage data into dollars -- the only language that seems to talk!]) shDistributed institutional self-archiving is simple, easy If only. Plenty of institutions do not have a repository yet, unfortunately. Only a concerted central archiving in discipline-oriented archives (such as PubMed Central in medicine and biology), which you seem to abhor, could conceivably deliver the immediacy you're looking for. Jan, I am afraid you are quite wrong on both counts! (1) The fact that plenty of institutions don't have OA archives yet is certainly not evidence that they are not simple and easy to create! (If BMC really intends to get into the business of helping institutions create archives, they had better get a better idea of what is involved. I suggest you start with reading the Handbook: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/ and then look more closely at the small subset of existing OA archives that not only exist, but have successfully overcome the much bigger hurdle, which is getting themselves filled. CalTech's is a good example: http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 Southampton's ECS archive is another (moreover, they wrote the book on the subject!): http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php (2) I
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
[MODERATOR'S NOTE: I will not reply to this message (as it looks to be veering towards non-substantive flaming) except to confirm that I recognise and value most of BMC's contributions to OA. -- S.H.] -- Stevan, I'd like to make a suggestion. Let's work on bringing about OA by whatever means we can. 1. Let's not perpetuate or aggravate misunderstandings such as quibbling about institutional self-archiving is simple, easy which is true if it means that establishing a repository is easy and relatively cheap for an institution, but not if it means that it's a doddle for authors to self-archive (the way I read it), which it isn't in all the institutions that don't have a repository yet. Instead, let's try to clarify such misunderstandings. 2. Please do not put words in my mouth that I never uttered, such as the true problem is not research access/impact but journal cost-recovery models and excess profits. I never said, nor would I ever say, that the true problem is not research access/impact, merely that there are other problems as well that make solving the 'true' problem more difficult. 3. Please refrain from disparaging remarks such as your one-sided view of OA has tied you into knots (which is, of course, easily retorted), or coming dangerously close to undermining the case for OA (which is not true and rather insulting coming from you, given that you are fully aware of what we try to do to bring about OA, being the first publisher who started OA on a sizeable scale, who instigated the political discussion in the UK Parliament, et cetera). 4. BioMed Central does not just endorse OA publishing and self-archiving, but far more than that: we actively pursue OA publishing in an effort to have a solid alternative available once subscription journals fail (both in the sense of proving an alternative model so that other publishers, such as scholarly societies, can follow the model and avoid extinction of their journals, and of providing alternative journals to replace those subscription titles that will fail altogether, as some publishers are bound to simply abandon publishing rather than convert to an OA model), and we also actively pursue the building of a widespread self-archiving infrastructure by offering setting up and, if desired, maintaining robust repositories for insitutions. 5. Your constructive contributions to OA are warmly welcomed; not your spurious calculations, endless repetitions of assertions, and slagging off, or worse, of others whose efforts to do what they can for OA are perhaps not always according to the Harnad orthodoxy. 6. Let's simply agree to disagree on certain issues, because they can both be right: Self-archiving is great, in the short run, but not in my view a sustainable method for continued OA; OA Publishing is great, but not in your view a quick enough route to OA. Soit. Best wishes, Jan Velterop
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Rick Anderson wrote: (1) What is the something that needs to be kept in mind? I repeat: it is that offering a scholarly author lots of readers may not tempt her to publish in an OA journal unless publishing in that journal will also confer upon her professional prestige. For example, as a tenure-seeking librarian, I would rather publish an article in, say, Serials Review than, say, American Libraries -- even though AL has many more readers than SR. And you are quite right to publish in the peer-reviewed journal that has the track record for the highest quality standards and prestige in your field (if that is indeed Serials Review!). But there is a systematic misunderstanding here (and that is why I have again redirected the discussion to the existing AmSci topic thread that has already been discussing this for some time): The misunderstanding is two-fold: It is either (1) being unaware of the green road to 100% OA (OA self-archiving of non-OA journal articles) altogether, and hence treating OA as if the only road to it were the golden road (creating/converting OA journals and publishing one's articles in them) or (2) being aware of both roads, but imagining that they can be treated independently, as if the other possibility did not even exist. I repeat: the *premise* of OA is peer-reviewed journal publication. If it were not, then (research) authors could maximize their potential readership by simply doing vanity self-publishing on their web pages: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 Moreover, it is part of that same premise (and has nothing to do with OA per se) that the (research) author wants to publish in the most suitable journal for his findings, both in terms of its subject matter and in terms of its established quality standards (prestige). So it is only on the assumption that this premise has been fulfilled -- publishing in the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept the article -- that the further question of maximizing users and usage comes up: There is no trade-off between this second question and the fulfillment of the first premise. And here is how the second question is answered: (Gold): Is the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept my article an OA journal? Then publish it there. (Green): Is the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept my article a non-OA journal? Then publish it there and also self-archive it to make it OA. That way users and usage are maximized either way, and no potential users, usage or impact are needlessly lost. You, Rick, have instead been systematically bracketing the Green option, and treating what I had proposed based on the full spectrum of options as if it applied only to Gold: Surely authors don't just want to maximize readers at all costs: They want journal prestige too, perhaps even more! But that's like giving a person a one-sided choice between stating that he either (1a) has or (1b) has not stopped beating his wife (without room for the premise that (2) he has never beaten his wife -- or has no wife at all!). The rationale for OA is not that the author just wishes to maximize his readers at all costs: It is that he wants to maximize his readers for articles he has published in the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept them. First fulfill the (non-OA) premise, *then* ask the question about how to maximize users, usage and impact. And the reason Rick keeps getting stuck in this one-sided choice between (1a) maximizing prestige and (1b) maximizing readership is that he thinks (1) Gold is the only OA option, or an option that somehow can and should be weighed independently of the other OA option, which is (2) Green. This is logically incoherent, hence strategically counterproductive. (2) What do you mean by OA providers? The authors who self-archive? The authors who publish in OA journals? Or the publishers of OA journals? Mainly, I'm talking about publishers of OA journals, since they're the ones who need to figure out how they're going to attract authors. You're right that self-archiving is a separate issue. I keep trying to talk about OA publishing. (That would probably be clearer to all if you didn't keep changing my subject headers for me.) I said self-archiving is *another option*, not a separate issue! Yes, OA journals (like all new journals) have to figure out how to attract authors. The fact that they can offer higher readership is a plus, but that does not offset the handicap of being a new journal, without a track-record and often with no impact factor yet. Moreover (and this is a subtle point, but an *extremely* pertinent one): Even the prospect of a maximized online readership with an OA journal -- the only reason, after all, that an *author* should consider preferring an OA journal over a
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On 12 Dec 2004, at 14:43, Stevan Harnad wrote: You need to stop and reconsider the mathematical logic of that statement, Stevan. (In fact, every author has the option of contributing to an OA journal, even if OA journals are a small minority in the journal marketplace.) I am always chuffed to have my logic challenged, as it gives some relief from the unjust stereotype that it is always I who am, curmudgeonly, chipping away at others' logic! Invitation accepted! Just to see where your mathematical logic leads, Rick, and then work backwards: are you suggesting that all 2.5 million articles currently published in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals could be rechanneled to just 1 of those 24,000 journals? No? Then let's do some mathematical induction: 2? 2%? 5%? No, 95% of the annual peer-reviewed literature cannot be squeezed through the keyhole of the 1383 OA journals known to exist today: http://www.doaj.org/ Moreover, there is a *function* being performed by that large and diverse array of existing journals, not only in covering all fields, but in covering, hierarchically, each level of each field. That's what choosing a suitable journal means (above): choosing the journal that covers the subject matter, and at the highest quality level (peer-review standard) that the paper can manage to successfully meet. This means (among other things) that journals must be selective -- in some cases (the top) *very* selective. It is not just a matter of squeezing all candidates into the tiny arbitrary subset of them that happen to share a certain cost-recovery model today! Imagine that back in 1983, I tried to persuade you that mobile phone cellular networks were going to transform how people communicate. Ah no, you would have counter-argued, mobile phone networks only have the capacity to handle 5% of the calls that are being made, so clearly that can't be the way forwards. But meanwhile, everyone has a fixed line phone. And you know what? If you carry around a really long extension cord with you whenever you leave the house, that gives you pretty much the same benefits. So instead of grappling with these new-fangled, unfamiliar mobile phone thingies (which can only handle 5% of calls), we could *all* have mobile communication now, if only everyone would plug in a really long extension cable and carry it with them at all times. Frankly I am utterly baffled by people's inability to recognize that mobile communication is in their grasp. And why do people keep conflating mobile communication with mobile phones?! Matt Cockerill, Ph.D. Technical Director, BioMed Central
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On 12 Dec 2004, at 19:10, Stevan Harnad wrote: Now let me count the ways in which the reality of researchers' needs and journal publishing goes against the analogy with cell-phones (or diesel engines, or motorcars, or computers, or TVs, or the web, or whatever piece of technology you choose in your sanguine projections -- though there will be something more to say about the analogy with the web in a moment): (1) OA journals are not a new piece of either hardware or software: they are merely a different cost-recovery model, and one that has not yet been tested and shown to be viable, sustainable and scalable. (I am not saying it will not; I am saying it has not yet been shown.) Economic viability, sustainability and scalability don't need to be shown. The only thing that needs to be shown is 'cultural' acceptance in the research community. Or even just in the funder community, which will do fine. Economic viability and sustainability will follow. (2) Until the viability, sustainability and scalability of the OA journal cost-recovery model has been tested and confirmed, it represents an undeniable risk for publishers. True, even when viability, sustainability and scalability are demonstrated, because the profits/surpluses that some have will be far less likely to be of the same magnitude of 40% plus. But self-archiving carries risks for those publishers, too. Even though your stock-in-trade answer is that such risk is 'counterfactual', given what happened so far in the high energy physics field. However, just as in investment banking, past performance is a poor indicator of future results. (3) As a consequence of this risk, very few publishers have dared to adopt the OA journal cost-recovery model to date. (This is not to say that the brave new publishers like BMJ or PLoS were wrong to try, nor that they are bound to fail; just that few have tried, and it is clear why not.) (4) Now, because only about 5% of the total 24,000 peer-reviewed journals have taken the risk of trying the OA cost-recovery model today, it follows that only about 5% of articles can be published in an OA journal today, even if the author, undeterred by the author-institution publication cost (as, I agree, he should not be, if the journal is otherwise suitable) wishes to publish in an OA journal. This is a logical flaw that presumes that paperflow is always static, from journal to journal, and that there can be no shift in submissions from one journal to another. It is plausible that not all articles at the moment can find an appropriate OA journal to be published in, but the implied proportionality to the number of journals in your argument is wrong. (5) First pause: There is no counterpart for this in the growth of cell-phone manufacture and usage: Providers were quite happy to have a go, and users were quite willing to buy and use. There was no counterpart of the uncertainty and risk about the cost-recovery model (which was much the same as with the conventional phone): just ordinary innovation, competition, and market forces. (6) Now let's continue, with the long-cord story: Not only is there already a viable alternative to the untested and risky OA cost-recovery model (in which I believe, by the way -- but I also believe it is premature), but, unlike the far-fetched long-cord analogy, which clearly does not have even an infinitesimal portion of the functionality of cell-phones, the self-archiving alternative provides 100% of the functionality of OA, just as OA publishing does: If the author has any benefits from OA at all, the benefits are equal whether the OA is achieved via gold or green. Ditto for the user. (7) Nor does self-archiving have any of the long-cord disadvantages dictated by the analogy: Distributed institutional self-archiving is simple, easy, If only. Plenty of institutions do not have a repository yet, unfortunately. Only a concerted central archiving in discipline-oriented archives (such as PubMed Central in medicine and biology), which you seem to abhor, could conceivably deliver the immediacy you're looking for. and highly desirable in its own right, over and above its power to confer 100% OA. (It could even eventually take over both the access-provision and archiving burden from *all* journals, making them all wireless peer-review service-providers instead of tying them down with having to provide and distribute and store paper and PDF products! But here I speculate only in order to show how unapt the long-cord analogy is!) (8) Yes, the self-archiving option requires that a few extra keystrokes be performed (by the author or by some other designated party), but those are one-time keystrokes per article (hardly comparable to walking around with a mile-long cord!) and a lot cheaper (for somebody) than paying the OA journal costs. I have compared self-archiving with a painkiller, as you know: it works to relieve the symptoms, but doesn't cure the underlying problem. This is not to say
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
I really do think there is an argument abroad that green self-archiving is worth engaging in because it will give experience in developing repositories, providing access, etc. But: why not cut to the chase? Why stumble over some pocket change en route to picking up the one thousand dollar bill that lies ahead on the sidewalk? Why not directly engage in infrastructural initiatives that will concurrently resolve access, affordability, preservation, and any number of other interwoven issues? If we librarians are to spend 5 or at 10 % of our valuable free time on an interesting project, imho it should be on promoting academic gold (whether institutionally subsidized or author pays, though I'm skeptical about the viability of the latter), and academically owned low-cost solutions, not self- archiving. Academic ownership of publishing is key; only then will the publishing monoliths be challenged. I will qualify my remarks somewhat. Perhaps, if it can be proved that green self-archiving is a very easy by-product of experience gained in promoting the afore-mentioned infrastructure, then librarians *may* want to spend *some* time providing it for faculty, if it does not significantly detract from attending to infrastructural, long lasting and stable solutions. However, I'm hard- pressed to find reason to do so, given the opportunity cost it would incur on pursuing a more viable infrastructure. It could well just be a time-draining impediment. Green remains, at best a secondary and ancillary goal, given that the goal of 100 per cent green, imho, will not be achieved, as argued elsewhere. Nor should it be pursued very vigorously by librarians, since it plays into the hands of commercial publisher largesse that can be pulled at any time when it becomes anything remotely approaching a threat to them. Incidentally, consider that those researchers who have tenure, and even some portion of those busy ones who do not, will not be sufficiently swayed about arguments concerning impact of research to find the motivation to green self- archive. For many scientists, an impending tenure decision supplies the animus that guides their initially feverish interest in publishing. Assuming they make the grade, some portion continue feverishly, but some large portion look forward to a bit of administrative work, refining their teaching, a glass of wine at the end of the day while watching Jim Lehrer, or playing with their grandchildren. Impact of research remains for them a concern, but whatever marginal benefits in terms of research impact that might accrue will not sufficiently motivate them to self-archive. They're happy if the small circle of workers in their niche see their work--and they will, one way or another. (This would be an interesting study: how many scientists use email attachments to forward their research around to the small circle of people in their niche, regardless of copyrigh provisions.) And there is this significant datum: *some* researchers are interested in the reform of publishing and access. Most, however, at least in the first world, grouse to their librarians when they cannot get to an unsubscribed title, but go ahead and submit an interlibrary request to achieve delayed access. Provision of rush services by ILL dept's are worth studying in this context. In any event, researchers for the most part do not regard it as their job to improve provision immediate access. They complain that they cannot get the goods immediately, but much of their involvement ends in just that--complaining. By the way, it is puzzling why ILL has so much dropped out of discussions of access; it works quite well around here, despite delays. I recognize that ILL in the third world is surely highly problematic, given that its success relies on a stock of publications held by at least one participating institution. But it does not follow that green self-archiving will provide a viable solution to this. Enough said. Brian Simboli
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On 7 Oct 2004, at 12:38, Brian Simboli wrote: But: why not cut to the chase? Why stumble over some pocket change en route to picking up the one thousand dollar bill that lies ahead on the sidewalk? Why not directly engage in infrastructural initiatives that will concurrently resolve access, affordability, preservation, and any number of other interwoven issues? If you haven't got enough money for a cup of coffee, pick up the change - if you haven't got enough access (or impact) start self-archiving now!!! I see this issue (and the recent discussions on this forum) as actually being a manifestation of the Research vs Development argument. There are some things that we know how to do, and we should do now to improve our world. There are other things that we don't quite know how to do yet, and we should research into those things. We should get funding to put the former into practice and funding to find out how the latter could be put into practice. (We might get these monies from different funding bodies with different agendas.) Self archiving is easy. We know how to do it. We have developed more than enough interoperable software platforms to make a really big impact on the literature and the way we can use it. We should be paid to install these systems and start using them! Preservation is difficult. No-one knows how to solve all its problems. We should be paid to examine how this could be achieved, and think about the various roles of the creators and funders and managers of digital resources and speculate about their future relationship to intellectual property. But it must be a fundamental tenet of RD that no practical, useful service should ever be harnessed to or held hostage by speculative, research code - not until the issues are well understood and it ceases to be a matter of research and intellectual enquiry. We should do the research, we should ask the questions, we MUST find the answers, but we should not delay or degrade our useful developments with our unfinished research. --- Les Carr University of Southampton
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Brian Simboli's points, below, have already been discussed many times in this Forum, but for those for whom the token just might at last drop this time, I will try again, from a slightly different angle: On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Brian Simboli wrote: I think the overlay journal concept is much more within practical reach than people realize. Why is there this unspoken assumption that green is any more practicable than, say, the overlay concept? Witness: http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt Overlay journals such as the journal above are merely an efficient new way of implementing conventional journals online. The idea is that instead of submitting your manuscript to the journal's website, you deposit it on your own website and just send the journal the URL. The editor looks it over, and if it is suitable for refereeing, sends the referees the URL. If it successfully passes peer review (the usual way), it is accepted and published -- which in this case merely means adding the journals accepted, peer-reviewed, published certification tag to the final accepted, revised, peer-reviewed postprint. Now this overlay method has nothing to do with whether or not the journal is an Open Access (OA, gold) journal. A Toll Access (TA) journal could implement peer-review this way too, and some of the American Physical Society (APS, green) journals have been doing this, though they also generate an APS-style edited PDF at the end, which is also archived in the APS archives, and printed as the print edition. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/peerev.ppt But overlay journals have nothing in principle to do with OA -- though of the few that exist, most are OA journals (gold). And self-archiving (green) is about providing OA to the articles published in the 95% of journals that are TA. That means self-archiving the peer-reviewed postprints, not just the unrefereed preprints. For the postprints, there is nothing for a journal to overlay on -- or rather, the overlay is already there, in the form of the metadata tag naming the journal in which the article was published. So Brian Simboli's cavalier suggestion that overlay journals are more within reach than (green) self-archiving is merely another one of those let them eat cake suggestions to researchers (hungry for access/impact), and in fact merely a variant on Waiting for Gold: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31.Waiting (The concept of overlay journals should not be confused with other hypothetical or barely tested proposals, such as replacing in-advance peer review with post-hoc opinion-polling, or with multiple peer review of the same article by many journals [a particularly profligate and unrealistic suggestion, considering how hard it is and how long it takes to get even one qualified expert to referee a paper even once!], or other post-hoc performance indicators such as Faculty of 1000, citations, or commentaries, which are really supplements to peer review rather than substitutes for it.) Why not devote precious dollars to this? Or the brunt of the dollars? Why not devote no dollars, and merely self-archive the articles that are already published in the journals that already exist? Why is counterfactual armchair speculation more gratifying than concrete, within-reach action? (But this question should of course be directed to the content-providers themselves, the researchers, who are also the beneficiaries of OA, not just at the well-meaning but entirely misguided librarians who are trying to guide them!) Also, I am told that arxiv.org has been willing to expand its subject coverage. Why not use that as a repository for final, refereed versions articles? Arxiv happens to be a central OAI-compliant OA archive. There are also many other distributed institutional OAI-compliant OA archives. All of them are open to all embryological stages of research papers, from the unrefereed preprint to the per-reviewed postprint and beyond. It is journals that provide the dynamic, interactive, answerable peer-review service in between whose outcome (when successful) is then certified by the journal's name -- its quality-control tag and its track-record. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse In other words, neither ArXiv nor any of the other OA Archives is or has ever been just for unrefereed preprints, waiting for overlay journals. They are, and always have been, for both preprints and postprints, and OA in particular -- whose objective is toll-free online access to the full-texts of all 2.5 million articles published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals -- is concerned first and foremost with Open Access to the peer-reviewed, published drafts, not to the unrefereed preprints. Now Brian for some reason does not like the green road -- of self-archiving one's final, refereed articles -- if it is done in an institutional OAI archive; there he recommends overlay journals instead. But he *does* like the green road -- of
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
First, I would like to thank Brian for his comments, and note that I wholeheartedly agree with almost all of them. One area where we have a difference of opinion is whether the question is to pursue the green or the gold road. I agree with Brian that the best solution for providing access, particularly in the long term, is the gold road. However, there are other reasons for simultaneously pursuing the green road, imho, which are: The IR approach will provide access to the literature which is published TA, both current and past. Gold publishing will not free up access to the previously published literature. There are other reasons for developing institutional repositories besides access to peer-reviewed articles, for example a secure home for faculty powerpoints at conferences, and student papers. The IR could be used for datasets and other purposes too. Preservation and archiving under the LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe) principle - even the article published in a gold journal, and copied to a central repostiroy, is more secure if a copy is archived in the university's IR as well. The IR provides access to the work of the university's own faculty, which may presently be denied. For example, of the 4 first articles submitted to the SFU Library Community D-space, half were published in journals that SFU Library does not subscribe to. These are not expensive journals - it's just that no university can afford to subscribe to all the journals. The IR in future will provide a collection of the university's work, which will serve as a different kind of information resource. Prospective students will be able to easily assess the research interests of faculty; local journalists will be able to find potential stories along with local experts they might be able to interview in person; The IR as collection of the university's own work will also serve as a valuable promotional tool for the university per se - both at the individual institutional level, and at the global level. People - whether politicians, the public at large, potential donors - will have a tool that lets them see the valuable contributions that universities in general, and/or a university in particular, make to the world. One other small difference of opinion: I agree with Brian that access is much better in North America than it is in the third world. However, I believe that there are limitations to access to be addressed here in the world's wealthiest countries too. ILL is one example. Typically, a research-based university will provide free ILL to students and faculty. Education-based universities often either do not provide free ILL, or place limitations on the number of requests, for financial reasons. Public libraries in many areas do not subsidize ILL at all. Open access copies will improve access at all these libraries. Even when your library does provide free ILL, the self-archived copy can mean the difference between immediate access and a delay. To summarize my position: IMHO, we should vigorously, and simultaneously, pursue both the green and the gold roads. Restricted access is problematic everywhere, although most notably so in poorer countries. best, Heather Morrison On 7-Oct-04, at 4:38 AM, Brian Simboli wrote: I really do think there is an argument abroad that green self-archiving is worth engaging in because it will give experience in developing repositories, providing access, etc. But: why not cut to the chase? Why stumble over some pocket change en route to picking up the one thousand dollar bill that lies ahead on the sidewalk? Why not directly engage in infrastructural initiatives that will concurrently resolve access, affordability, preservation, and any number of other interwoven issues? If we librarians are to spend 5 or at 10 % of our valuable free time on an interesting project, imho it should be on promoting academic gold (whether institutionally subsidized or author pays, though I'm skeptical about the viability of the latter), and academically owned low-cost solutions, not self- archiving. Academic ownership of publishing is key; only then will the publishing monoliths be challenged. I will qualify my remarks somewhat. Perhaps, if it can be proved that green self-archiving is a very easy by-product of experience gained in promoting the afore-mentioned infrastructure, then librarians *may* want to spend *some* time providing it for faculty, if it does not significantly detract from attending to infrastructural, long lasting and stable solutions. However, I'm hard- pressed to find reason to do so, given the opportunity cost it would incur on pursuing a more viable infrastructure. It could well just be a time-draining impediment. Green remains, at best a secondary and ancillary goal, given that the goal of 100 per cent green, imho, will not be achieved, as argued elsewhere. Nor should it be pursued very vigorously by librarians, since it
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
This discussion is going to turn to discussion about true task of an academic librarian! For Steven Harnad it is acquisition, and to Brian Simboli it is acquisition + preservation. Both views are somewhat limited, I believe. Librarians should be responsible for provision (in very broad meaning) of academic content + presentation and preservation of that content + education of users +... And if that is the case, then care about self-archiving and self-archived material is also our task. And preservation of self-archived content, where there is some, is a natural concern of librarians. (I agree that this concern should come second, after some content is self-archived). There are two reasons for that: institutional repositories often include content that is not peer-reviewed journal literature, and is not going to be archived and preserved elsewhere (and institutions and their libraries still think that content is worth saving). Other reason is that, for some time now, preservation of journal content is mostly out of scope of libraries. For most of journals, we have only licensed right of access, not permanent holdings. So, the self-archived copy of some paper might actually be the only one that library has. Again, I don't think that any of these concerns should distract anyone from self-archiving. Another thing that worries Brian Simboli is that green publishers are going to prohibit self-archiving again, and that building institutional archives is therefore a risky business, and not worth spending librarians valuable time. This concern sounds rather groundless to me, and experience with publishers in physics shows opposite effect: once that authors are used to self-archive, no publisher will dare to take that privilege away. One more thing. It was a pleasure to read David Goodman's posting about librarian's attitude toward OA. Stevan Harnad's repeated statements that librarians are 'guilty' of over-emphasising gold road to OA, to the expense of self-archiving, are based on two (I firmly believe) wrong assumptions: 1. that librarians support gold OA primarily, and 2. that librarians are naive enough to think that gold OA could spread to 100% and solve all their problems in very short terms. (But, David Goodman's estimation is over-optimistic: it assumes that 100% of librarians are aware and well-informed about OA, and that is certainly not the case.) Rest of this post is a quote from the post Tibor Toth and I have sent to gpgnet forum on OA, and it is relevant for this discussion. ...Even for scientists, it is much easier to raise their interest about affordability and pricing issues (and it is so fun to hate Elsevier!) then to make them think about lost impact of their work and about their part of responsibility for that. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that, until recently, there were no scientific evidence of lost impact, and no exact figures to show (the highly cited Lawrence paper was about online access, not open access, and was applied only to one narrow field), while on the other hand we always had very nice figures as evidences for affordability crisis When it comes to OA journals, we believe that the 'author-pay' model (although a very innovative and welcome new financial model) has been over emphasised, not just at the expense of self-archiving, but also at the expense of a 'subsidised model' of OA journals. (The reason for that is not clear to us. It has been suggested that librarians [oversold] the 'gold' road, but scientists and journalists certainly share that guilt. It is hard to believe that any realistic librarian ever thought that the 'gold' road could solve their problems overnight.) Some final thoughts on the role of information specialists and librarians. One issue has rarely been stressed, and we believe that for our profession it is actually the main challenge with regard to OA. It is the issue of discovery and retrieval of OA information. Today, there is already a wealth of OA papers inside OAI archives, but also on individual or departmental web sites, or elsewhere. For the OAI papers, it should be easy -- we only have to use some OAI service provider. But how many scientists are using OAIster, for instance? And how many librarians are telling them to? And for the OA papers scattered across the web, we should probably use Google to find them. But Google isn't a perfect tool for searching scientific information. Information seeking habits of scientists are a complex topic, and OA information seeking is a rather unknown area (except for physicists, of course). Some researchers rely heavily on secondary services (both in information searching and in evaluation of research results), and those are usually not taking into account OA resources. Information specialists have a lot to do, both in educating users, and in inventing and building new and innovative pathways to information, and value-added
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science Southampton University, UK --- Dear All, I ask gpgNet forum readers to note how frequently in Jan Velterop's mostly useful and informative posting [See, http://groups.undp.org/read/messages?id=97847 ], Open Access keeps being used interchangeably with Open Access Publishing (the golden road to Open Access [OA]). OA and OA Publishing are not the same, so no wonder that the arguments for and against the one are not the same as the arguments for and against the other. There are indeed some unanswered questions about the sustainability of the OA Publishing model -- which replaces the non-OA user-institution-end cost-recovery model with either an author-institution-end cost-recovery model or a subsidy model -- and these questions are in the process of being tested by the new OA Journals that exist so far (about 1200, or 5%). The answers are hence not yet known. http://www.doaj.org/ But meanwhile the green road to OA -- which is to provide OA to the articles published in the remaining 22,800 non-OA journals (95%) through author/institution self-archiving -- is already providing three times as much OA today (about 15%) as the golden road is providing (about 5%). And, more important still, OA self-archiving has the immediate power to scale up to 100% OA virtually overnight, without the need to wait for the conversion of the remaining 22,800 non-OA journals to OA. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31.Waiting 100% OA solves (completely!) the research access/impact problem; it does not solve the journal pricing/affordability problem (but it does make it a good deal less urgent and important!). Until we clearly distinguish OA from OA publishing, and until we clearly distinguish the research access/impact problem from the journal pricing/affordability problem, there will be unrelenting confusion about the nature, purpose and benefits of OA. And until we realize that the green road of OA self-archiving is the most direct, broadest, fastest, and surest road to immediate OA, we will have neither 100% OA nor any prospect at all of 100% OA Publishing (because the green road of OA self-archiving is *also* the fastest and surest road to an eventual conversion to gold [OA Publishing] too, if there is indeed ever to be one!). Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/impact.html Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html Now try re-reading Jan Velterop's posting to see which of the arguments and uncertainties about OA are in fact just arguments and uncertainties about OA Publishing (gold), which of the benefits of OA Publishing are in fact the benefits of OA itself -- and how OA self-archiving (green) fits into the otherwise far from complete picture. The answer is not, I think, just to remind us that BioMed Central is now offering to help with self-archiving too! BioMed Central to offer OAI repository service http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3969.html All help is of course welcome, but what is needed today is also a clear conceptual and strategic picture of OA, and a clear sense of how the complementary gold and green strategies actually fit into it, and what their respective functions and probabilities actualy are. This clarity will not come from continuing to treat OA as if it were identical with OA Publishing (gold), and as if the goal of OA were to solve the journal pricing/affordability problem rather than the research access/impact problem. OA Self-Archiving (green) must be fully and clearly and *explicitly* integrated into the OA strategic picture. This is not an *economic* matter but a *policy* matter -- for the providers and funders of the research that provides the content of the journal articles that this is all about! http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum Professor of Cognitive Science Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, UK URL: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ --- 20 September- 4 October 2004: gpgNet Forum on Open Access to Scholarly Publications: A Model for Enhanced Knowledge Management? Co-hosted with the Open Society Institute (OSI). Read background paper to the discussion at http://www.gpgnet.net/topic08.php View messages posted to this forum at http://groups.undp.org/read/?forum=gpgnet-oa To post your comments on the issue, send them to: gpgnet...@groups.undp.org
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Fytton Rowland wrote: Stevan's reply to Brian is precisely what one would have expected him to say, given his previous statements. Like Stevan, I agree that peer-reviewed journals should stay, though exactly what a journal will look like in the middle-distance future is arguable. The majority of journals, as he also points out, are toll-access still. However, Brian had specifically talked about in the long run. The issue, which Stevan usually specifically excludes talking about, but others of us may want to think about, is this: What happens if we are all merrily self-archiving our published papers, and thus no-one needs to buy journals any more, so they go out of business and thus can't organise the peer-review and editing processes any more? Stevan tends to say let's self-archive and worry about the other thing if it happens. Others of us may wish to do slightly more pro-active crystal-ball gazing. Actually, I tend to say I have stopped speculating about hypothetical future contingencies in the interests of present certainties, but if forced, I would repeat the speculation I have already made, and with which I have already replied to this question many, many times before. Here it is again in longhand (instead of just a link, which people apparently tend to ignore): http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm 4.2 Hypothetical Sequel: Self-archiving is sufficient to free the refereed research literature (steps i-iv, section 4.1). We can also guess at what may happen after that, but these are really just guesses. Nor does anything depend on their being correct. For even if there is no change whatsoever -- even if Universities continue to spend exactly the same amounts on their access-toll budgets as they do now -- the refereed literature will have been freed of all access/impact barriers forever. However, it is likely that there will be some changes as a consequence of the freeing of the literature by author/institution self-archiving. This is what those changes might be: v. Users will prefer the free version? It is likely that once a free, online version of the refereed research literature is available, not only those researchers who could not access it at all before, because of toll-barriers at their institution, but virtually all researchers will prefer to use the free online versions. Note that it is quite possible that there will always continue to be a market for the toll-based options (on-paper version, publisher's on-line PDF, deluxe enhancements) even though most users use the free versions. Nothing hangs on this. vi. Publisher toll revenues shrink, Library toll savings grow? But if researchers do prefer to use the free online literature, it is possible that libraries may begin to cancel journals, and as their windfall toll savings grow, journal publisher toll-revenues will shrink. The extent of the cancellation will depend on the extent to which there remains a market for the toll-based add-ons, and for how long. If the toll-access market stays large enough, nothing else need change. vii. Publishers downsize to become providers of the peer-review service plus optional add-on products? It will depend entirely on the size of the remaining market for the toll-based options whether and to what extent journal publishers will have to down-size to providing only the essentials: The only essential, indispensable service is peer review. viii. Peer-review service costs funded by author-institution out of reader-institution toll savings? If publishers can continue to cover costs and make a decent profit from the toll-based optional add-ons market, without needing to down-size to peer-review provision alone, nothing much changes. But if publishers do need to abandon providing the toll-based products altogether (for lack of a market) and to scale down instead to providing only the peer-review service, then universities, having saved 100% of their annual access-toll budgets, will have plenty of annual windfall savings from which to pay for their own researchers' continuing (and essential) annual journal-submission peer-review costs (10-30%); the rest of their savings (70-90%) they can spend as they like (e.g., on books -- plus a bit for Eprint Archive maintenance). Reference: Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003) For Whom the Gate Tolls? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/39/index.html Published as: Harnad, Stevan (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003.
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Stevan Harnad wrote: The rate of new OA journal start-ups is not likely to increase substantially, because the literature is already journal-saturated, and there are few new journal niches. Most OA journal growth is hence likely to come from the conversion of existing TA (toll-access) journals to OA, in one of three ways: (1) The journal remains TA, but makes its online version OA. (2) The journal abandons the TA cost-recovery model and adopts the OA (author-end) cost-recovery model. (3) The journal's editorial board and authorship -- hence, effectively, its title -- defect to an OA publisher. There is [yet] another reason why self-archiving is not only highly desirable, but necessary as one of the means to achieve open access: [It] is because some of the open access journal publishing models - new journals, defections - would only cover present and future publications, and never make accessible past publications. In order to ensure maximum access to the previously published literature, self-archiving is not only the best option, but for a great deal of the literature, may be the only option. Would self-archiving increase impact even for articles that have passed their normal citation peak, as they find a new audience? This might vary with discipline. In every discipline, there are classic articles and less-researched areas where even older articles still have current validity. Plus, of course, access to the full range of literature is needed for historical studies, studies of the scientific process per se, etc. Self-archiving has other advantages besides open access per se. For example, institutional repositories can potentially form a cohesive picture of the institution's research output as a whole; and I predict that a well-developed institutional repository filled with high-quality research output, will further add to the prestige of researching organizations in the future, in the eyes of everyone from key stakeholders to the best potential grad students and future faculty to the public at large. Authors who also self-archive on their own web sites will have a form of collected works, which for active researchers will enhance their reputations and enrich their CVs. This is not meant to discourage open access journal publishing. There is more than one road to open access, and the two are not mutually exclusive at all. The ideal just might be to publish in an open access journal, and self-archive too. a personal opinion by, Heather G. Morrison Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network Phone: 604-268-7001 Fax: 604-291-3023 Email: heath...@eln.bc.ca Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
This may be a fairly dumb question, but recently I've read some posts about publishers who are blue or gold or some other color. I'm finding myself very confused by all this color business. Is there a standard list that describes what the various colors represent? Is it fairly new? I've been reading about it quite a bit recently and wondered how long it has been around and what its potential staying power is. Susan L. Payne, Librarian for Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University -- Moderator's Reply: The color code is extremely simple, and reflects the specific distinctions with which the Open Access (OA) initiative is concerned: A GREEN publisher (or journal) has given its official green light to its authors to self-archive their papers (i.e., make them OA by depositing the full-text on a toll-free, publicly accessible website). The green color comes from the original Romeo project, which listed publisher policies on author self-archiving: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ Because one can self-archive either the unrefereed preprint or the peer-reviewed postprint, green can come in two shades: pale-green for preprints and bright-green for postprints (or both). But the distinction between the shades of green is much less important then the distinction between publishers (or journals) that are or are-not green at all. In the original Romeo color-code, non-green was coded as white: i.e., a publisher that has not yet given its green light either to preprint self-archiving or to postprint self-archiving. (Because white is often the background colour of a page, however, I have recently proposed that non-green be coded as gray rather than white. I hope this change will be adopted. In any case, green vs. not-green is what has entered into general parlance. White publishers have not been explicitly so-called much, so not much would be involved in agreeing to call them gray instead!) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3699.html In the original Romeo color-code, blue was the code for a publisher who gave the green (sic!) light to preprint self-archiving only or postprint self-archiving only, but not both. It is now obvious that these are really two shades of green, not, confusingly, another color. So I have proposed dropping blue altogether, using pale-green for preprint-only, and bright-green for postprint (as well as for both postprint preprint, since the postprint is what OA is really all about). In the new SHERPA/Romeo, still more unnecessary colors have been introduced, but the new color code is still under discussion and I am hoping that economy and functionality will prevail, and the new SHERPA colors will be dropped. The new SHERPA colors would have been: green (both), blue (postprint-only), yellow (preprint-only), white (neither). That would have left us with green publishers, blue publishers, yellow publishers and white publishers. I think the only distinction between publishers that needs to be given a color-code insofar as self-archiving policy is concerned, is whether or not they give their green light to self-archiving *at all*: If yes, they are green. If not, they are not. The two shades of green are only for those who are specifically interested in preprint vs. postprint policy, and the shades need only appear as a code in the entries in the Romeo list. They need not be used as a general descriptor for publishers unless one is specifically interested in highlighting preprint/postprint policy differences. There is one prominent distinction among green publishers, however, that *does* deserve a color-code of its own, and not just a different shade of green, and that is whether or not a green publisher is also an Open Access (OA) publisher: OA publishers not only give the green light to both preprint and postprint self-archiving by the author, but the publishers themselves archive all their articles publicly. Such OA publishers are called gold publishers and their journals are gold journals. It will be noted that just as bright-green (postprint self-archiving) is dominant over pale-green (preprint self-archiving), in that we code it as bright-green whether the green light is for postprint-only or for postprint+preprint, whereas the pale-green code is for preprint-only, similarly, gold (OA journal) is dominant over green, in that if a journal is gold, it is implicit that it also gives the green light to author self-archiving. This kind of asymmetric coding, in which one of the binary values does a double-duty, coding both a particular value and a generic value whereas the other the codes only a particular value is called markedness (q.v.) and it is a very general property of natural language. (Test it out by noting the difference between asking how *long* a line is vs. asking how short a line is: one inquires only about generic length, the other
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
It's only now that I found some time to react. Stevan's statement below makes his position clear, at least to me. Stevan is like the son who tells his friends that cars are practically for free. The only thing that you have to do is beg your father to buy you one. Rightly so! The point is I am the father. Leo Waaijers [Reply from Stevan Harnad: I am not telling my friends (fellow-researchers) to ask their fathers (institutional librarians) to buy them a car (journal). I am suggesting they walk! It costs nothing to self-archive one's own (published) journal-articles, and it has nothing *whatsoever* to do with one's institution's journal expenditures. Please don't confuse it with telling my friends to publish in OA (gold) journals, which *do* cost their fathers some money!] -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 23 March, 2004 18:27 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Waaijers, Leo wrote: As someone must bear the costs, this someone must be the author's institution then. However, in many a case this is the same institution as the reader's. So, at the end of the day the financial effects of both approaches (toll gate, or 'open submission' as Declan Butler calls it elegantly, and 'open access') meet at the table of the financial manager of the institution. Yes, both Toll-Access (TA) Journal-Publishing and Open-Access (OA) Journal-Publishing are paid for by the institution -- the reader/institution in the one case and the author-institution in the other. But it must be noted that OA provision via author self-archiving is orthogonal to this; it is done in parallel. It neither decreases nor increases an institution's expenses (the annual expense per paper self-archived is truly trivial). It merely increases an institution's access to the research output of other institutions -- and increases the impact of an institution's own research output. The latter in turn usually means more research funding for the institution. But not for the library. The library spends neither more nor less, and receives neither more nor less, with institutional self-archiving. It is this that needs to be borne in mind in reckoning the costs and benefits of institutional self-archiving, not its implications for the institutional library budget! Stevan Harnad 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 http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Waaijers, Leo wrote: May I stretch your argumentation a little, just to find out if I understand you well? Would you say: no matter who pays the publication costs and how high they are, as long as the publication is not at the cost of the reader an open access protagonist is satisfied? First, can we correct this to: at the cost of the *user or the user's institution,* so as to avoid turning this into a question about licensing? With that slight clarification, however, my answer is that yes, that is absolutely correct! But let's not stretch that no matter how *too* high: If the OA is bought at the cost of enslaving the planet we have gone off into science fiction! For what is really at issue here (rather than mysterious counterfactual conjectures) is just this: There are currently about 24,000 peer-reviewed journals publishing about 2.5 million articles yearly. Most of those journals (95%) are Toll Access (TA). That means the only users who can access the articles published in those journals are those users whose institutions can afford to pay the access-tolls for those journals. Let us call the total amount that the planet pays for those TA journals today T$ and the total number of users who can thereby access them today TN. Now consider the following two scenarios: The institutions that are currently doing the paying keep paying into the T$ (apart from the usual price negotiations, cancellations, budget variations, etc.) and the TN users keep using whatever their own institutions can afford. Let us say that, by this means, each of the 2.5 million annual articles is on average accessible to t% of its potential users and inaccessible to (100-t)% of its potential users. So now we would like to reduce that (100-t)% to zero, or, equivalently, raise that t% to 100% (i.e., OA), for all 2.5 million articles. How do we do that? One way is to try to create or convert more OA journals. Remember 5% of the 24,000 journals are already OA journals: So we would like to raise that 5% to 100%. Let us try to do that, by all means. But let us admit that it will be a slow and uncertain business, because so far few of the TA journals have shown the inclination to take the risk of converting, and the business of creating competing journals is a slow and uncertain one too. But we are working on it. What about those (100-t)% of potential users per article in the meanwhile? Should they resign themselves to waiting? And should the authors of those articles resign themselves to losing the corresponding percentage of their potential research impact? Or is there something else to be done? Something that does not change the amount of money being spent (T$) nor the number of users for whom that money buys access (TN) nor even the ongoing efforts to create or convert more OA journals. Just something that will bring the percentage of potential users per article from t% closer to 100%; In fact, to test Leo's stretching hypothesis, let us suppose that this other something, which does not lower (or raise) what is being spent -- nor the number of users benefitting from what is being spent, nor the amount of effort we put into creating/converting OA journals -- *does* take us all the way to 100% access to all articles for all their would-be users, i.e takes us to OA. Is there any reason whatsoever to hold this outcome at arm's length just because it has not lowered T$ by one penny? This other something is of course the self-archiving of all the TA articles by their authors, in order to make them OA. This OA self-archiving is already today providing (according to the latest JISC/OSI Survey's estimate, which I suspect may be somewhat high because of a sampling anomaly) 40% access, 10 times as much as the 4% that is currently being provided by OA Journal publishing: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html Let as (to be conservative) halve the estimate for OA self-archiving to 20%. And let us (to be gracious) increase the estimate for OA journal publishing to 5% (corresponding to its approximate percentage of the OA journals as per http://www.doaj.org/ That means we have already enhanced the t% accessibility to potential users by 20% + 5% = 25% or t/4 (and reduced the (100-t)% inaccessibility by t/4). What does that amount mean in usage and impact? We can estimate that as well: Lawrence (2001), confirmed now by Kurtz et al. (2003), Kurtz (2004) and Brody et al. (2004) find that the number of readers is doubled and the number of citations is tripled by OA. So an increase from t% accessibility to (5t/4)% arises from the existing OA self-archiving (plus the existing OA journals) at no extra cost: Is there any reason whatsoever not to increase this to 100% accessibility through 100% OA at the very same cost? (Leo's reply will no doubt introduce speculations about self-archiving leading to journal cancellations, leading in turn to journal price rises or journal collapse.
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
I fully agree with David Goodman that clarity of terminology is needed
(whether or not we can agree on 'standard' terminology).
Below an attempt to clarify some terms. It goes without saying that
constructive suggestions for further clarification or for better terms are
welcomed.
At BioMed Central we speak of two categories of articles:
-'Research articles' ('primary' articles, 'fact-oriented') and
-'Other articles' (which includes reviews, comments, and other
'opinion-oriented' articles as well as news and the like)
'Open Access'
This DOES apply to ALL the Research articles; it MAY apply to Other articles
-- if they have somehow been paid for, e.g. by sponsorship or a subvention.
Otherwise they are...
'Subscription-Paid'.
Much of the 'added-value' for these articles either comes from, or is made
possible, by the publisher, there is choice (no 'publish-or-perish pressure;
publishing comments or review articles is rarely a 'must'), and subscription
charges or sponsorship, or a combination of those, are sensible ways of
recovering the costs).
'Input-Paid'
We avoid the term 'author-paid', because that is rarely true, and it is
certainly not expected that authors pay from their own pocket. We speak of
'input-paid' (suggestions for a better term are always welcome) and we
regard...
'Article Processing Fees'
(NOT 'author-fees') as an integral part of the research expenditure, as
publishing the results is necessary and integral to a research project.
'Deposit'
is what we do with all the Open Access articles immediately, in several
trusted Open Access Repositories, such as PubMed Central (and INIST in
France, and Potsdam University in Germany). 'Other' articles are deposited
and 'opened' after two years.
'Preserve'
is what the Dutch Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB) does for us.
They have committed to 'preserve' the content in case format changes should
be neccessary in the future. The KB archives and preserves material from
other publishers, such as Elsevier and Kluwer, as well, but in contrast to
that material, the BioMed Central articles and journals are not bound by any
restrictive contracts and freely available from the KB.
We host the material ourselves on the BioMed Central platform and, in
addition, the Repositories mentioned above function as mirrors.
Jan Velterop
BioMed Central
-Original Message-
From: David Goodman [mailto:david.good...@liu.edu]
Sent: 22 March 2004 01:24
To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
Subject: What is Open Access?
In our discussions of OA, I feel there is a need for better
terminology
to distinguish between the arXiv-like database or repository model,
in any of its modifications, and the two types of journals those paid
at the reader end, and those paid for at the journal-production end.
For journal-production-end journals, I particularly dislike
author-paid,
as it is not the intention of any of the proponents that the author
personally will pay for the publication of the article. I think
sponsor-paid also bad, as the research sponsor pays through indirect
costs a good deal of the convention system's costs. (And of course
the same goes for university-paid, researcher-paid, and so forth).
For the current type of journal, library-paid is not really correct,
as the library pays from money it receives from elsewhere, (and as it
has been proposed earlier that the library might pay the costs of the
new system). Reader paid or user-paid is also not right, as the reader
or user almost never directly pays.
For the various database or repository models, I particularly
dislike the
term archive, because this is widely used in another meaning, though
a closely related one: an ultimate reference copy--which
would be only a
part of such a system. Database is a very general term, and
has been used
by the aggregators like Ebsco to mean their databases of
journal articles
republished from the original journals, which is certainly
not the intent.
I am not making suggestions, just hoping for them.
Arbitrary numerical , color, or place-name designations are out of
bounds--we need meaningful names, not code.
To distinguish the pseudo-open access as used to mean open access to
part of the journal: I think full open access and partial open access
are sufficient , and non-pejorative.
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgood...@liu.edu
(and, formerly: Princeton University Library)
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Jan Velterop wrote, under the subject thread
What is Open Access?:
I fully agree with David Goodman that clarity of terminology is needed
Jan Velterop's terminology is welcome, but please note that the
subcategories he introduces below are all merely subdivisions among
articles that are OA because they have been published in OA Journals
(i.e., gold). The terms and categories do not apply at all to articles
(published in TA journals) that are OA because they have been
self-archived by their authors (i.e., green).
At BioMed Central we speak of two categories of articles:
-'Research articles' ('primary' articles, 'fact-oriented') and
-'Other articles' (which includes reviews, comments, and other
'opinion-oriented' articles as well as news and the like)
These are BMC categories, rather than OA categories. The only OA category
is whether the article has or has not appeared in a peer-reviewed
journal, and whether the OA version is the pre-refereeing preprint or
the peer-reviewed postprint.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
'Open Access'
This DOES apply to ALL the Research articles; it MAY apply to Other articles
-- if they have somehow been paid for, e.g. by sponsorship or a subvention.
Again, these distinctions do not seem to be OA distinctions but BMC
distinctions.
Otherwise they are...
'Subscription-Paid'.
Much of the 'added-value' for these articles either comes from, or is made
possible, by the publisher, there is choice (no 'publish-or-perish pressure;
publishing comments or review articles is rarely a 'must'), and subscription
charges or sponsorship, or a combination of those, are sensible ways of
recovering the costs).
This is not quite clear. Is this stating that review articles in BMC are not OA
but must be paid for by the subscriber?
Or is this not about BMC, but a general observation about review articles
in other journals? In such cases I would say that it is up to the author
whether he wishes to provide OA for his article -- unless, of course, the
author has been paid by the journal to write the article as a work-for-hire,
in which case I agree of course that it is *not* a candidate for being OA:
The OA movement applies only to author give-away articles:
The literature that should be freely accessible online is that
which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1
'Input-Paid'
We avoid the term 'author-paid', because that is rarely true, and it is
certainly not expected that authors pay from their own pocket. We speak of
'input-paid' (suggestions for a better term are always welcome) and we
regard...
This is again a subcategory of OA publishing (gold) not of OA itself.
'Article Processing Fees'
(NOT 'author-fees') as an integral part of the research expenditure, as
publishing the results is necessary and integral to a research project.
Again an OA publishing category. Call it whatever one will, these fees
are what must be paid to the OA journal to cover its costs.
There is no agreement yet on how high those costs are, or what they
should cover. According to some OA publishing models, they should
cover all the current values-added of TA journals, with the possible
exception of the costs of printing and distributing the print-on-paper
edition. According to other OA publishing models (including the one I
would favour, if/when OA publishing should ever prevail), they
should cover only the cost of implementing peer-review. The task of
text-generation and mark-up can instead be offloaded onto the author and
the cost of (online) archiving and access provision can be offloaded onto
the author's institution.
Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html
'Deposit'
is what we do with all the Open Access articles immediately, in several
trusted Open Access Repositories, such as PubMed Central (and INIST in
France, and Potsdam University in Germany). 'Other' articles are deposited
and 'opened' after two years.
This is a confusing and even somewhat contentious matter, again as between the
meaning of the terms in OA publishing in particular (gold), OA self-archiving
in particular (green), and OA in general.
First, we must note that for an article to be OA at all, it must
necessarily be deposited somewhere online, so as to fulfill the defining
criterion of OA: that it must be accessible to everyone toll-free online!
Now in the case of articles being made OA by being published in a TA journal and
then self-archived online by their own authors, the word deposit is synonymous
with the word self-archive, and it is unambiguous that it is the author who
does the depositing (or his departmental designee or his institution's
digital librarian does it for him), either (1) on his own website or (2)
in a central OA Eprint Archive or
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Stevan, You say: No matter who pays the publication costs and how high they are, as long as the publication is not at the cost of the user or the user's institution, an open access protagonist is satisfied. I think that 'user' is synonym for 'reader' in your statement. OK? But, normally, readers don't pay. It's their library who pays, that means their institution. This reduces your statement to: No matter who pays the publication costs and how high they are, as long as the publication is not at the cost of the reader's institution, an open access protagonist is satisfied. As someone must bear the costs, this someone must be the author's institution then. However, in many a case this is the same institution as the reader's. So, at the end of the day the financial effects of both approaches (toll gate, or 'open submission' as Declan Butler calls it elegantly, and 'open access') meet at the table of the financial manager of the institution. And, whether you like it or not, (s)he wants to compare. When promoting open access in the Netherlands, I am confronted with questions about the underlying business model of open access. For open access journals, the gold road, this is not too difficult. I can easily demonstrate that the scientific community pays Elsevier $ 8000 for having an article refereed, published and made accesible to a minority of that same community, where BMC asks $525 and PLoS $1500 for refereeing, publishing and making the article accesible to everybody. The subsequent discussion is then reduced to the question whether BMC is too cheap or PLoS too expensive. I allways answer that, contrary to the subscription world, the open access world operates in a market situation and that will keep prices competetive. But the business case for the green road is far more difficult to explain. First we have to pay Elsevier $8000 for the publication of the article, then we have to beg permission for self archiving it and then some institution has to put it in its institutional repository (again costs!) to make it worldwide accessible. To hesitant looks my defense is: It's better than nothing, but I always have the feeling that I am not very convincing. I could parafrase you and try: Money is irrelevant. Still not convincing, I am afraid. May be that's why for articles the green road is less succesful than we al wish it to be. Also because the permission to self archive it, is not always given or, when it is given, is limited to access within the author's institution. For the time being it is better than nothing, but it is not a sustainable solution in my opinion. Leo. -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: 23-3-2004 1:37 Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Waaijers, Leo wrote: May I stretch your argumentation a little, just to find out if I understand you well? Would you say: no matter who pays the publication costs and how high they are, as long as the publication is not at the cost of the reader an open access protagonist is satisfied? First, can we correct this to: at the cost of the *user or the user's institution,* so as to avoid turning this into a question about licensing? With that slight clarification, however, my answer is that yes, that is absolutely correct! But let's not stretch that no matter how *too* high: If the OA is bought at the cost of enslaving the planet we have gone off into science fiction! For what is really at issue here (rather than mysterious counterfactual conjectures) is just this: There are currently about 24,000 peer-reviewed journals publishing about 2.5 million articles yearly. Most of those journals (95%) are Toll Access (TA). That means the only users who can access the articles published in those journals are those users whose institutions that can afford to pay the access-tolls for those journals. Let us call the total amount that the planet pays for those TA journals today T$ and the total number of users who can thereby access them today TN. Now consider the following two scenarios: The institutions that are currently doing the paying keep paying into the T$ (apart from the usual price negotiations, cancellations, budget variations, etc.) and the TN users keep using whatever their own institutions can afford. Let us say that, by this means, each of the 2.5 million annual articles is on average accessible to t% of its potential users and inaccessible to (100-t)% of its potential users. So now we would like to reduce that (100-t)% to zero, or, equivalently, raise that t% to 100% (i.e., OA), for all 2.5 million articles. How do we do that? One way is to try to create or convert more OA journals. Remember 5% of the 24,000 journals are already OA journals: So we would like to raise that 5% to 100%. Let us try to do that, by all means. But let us admit that it will be a slow and uncertain business, because so far few of the TA
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Waaijers, Leo wrote: As someone must bear the costs, this someone must be the author's institution then. However, in many a case this is the same institution as the reader's. So, at the end of the day the financial effects of both approaches (toll gate, or 'open submission' as Declan Butler calls it elegantly, and 'open access') meet at the table of the financial manager of the institution. Yes, both Toll-Access (TA) Journal-Publishing and Open-Access (OA) Journal-Publishing are paid for by the institution -- the reader/institution in the one case and the author-institution in the other. But it must be noted that OA provision via author self-archiving is orthogonal to this; it is done in parallel. It neither decreases nor increases an institution's expenses (the annual expense per paper self-archived is truly trivial). It merely increases an institution's access to the research output of other institutions -- and increases the impact of an institution's own research output. The latter in turn usually means more research funding for the institution. But not for the library. The library spends neither more nor less, and receives neither more nor less, with institutional self-archiving. It is this that needs to be borne in mind in reckoning the costs and benefits of institutional self-archiving, not its implications for the institutional library budget! And, whether you like it or not, (s)he wants to compare. When promoting open access in the Netherlands, I am confronted with questions about the underlying business model of open access. We are once again back to OA journal-publishing, its business model, and its implications for the library journals expenditure! This has (almost) *nothing* to do with the benefits of self-archiving. To reckon it this way is to force both self-archiving and OA itself into a Procrustean bed, to try to shape it according to this arbitrary (and almost unrelated) metric. (I say almost because in fact there is the hypothetical possibility that the growth of OA via self-archiving might eventually save libraries money. But that is hypothetical, whereas the research benefits of OA are immediate and objective, and have nothing whatsoever to do with library budgets one way or the other!) For open access journals, the gold road, this is not too difficult. I can easily demonstrate that the scientific community pays Elsevier $ 8000 for having an article refereed, published and made accesible to a minority of that same community, where BMC asks $525 and PLoS $1500 for refereeing, publishing and making the article accesible to everybody. The subsequent discussion is then reduced to the question whether BMC is too cheap or PLoS too expensive. I allways answer that, contrary to the subscription world, the open access world operates in a market situation and that will keep prices competetive. That's all fine, but again irrelevant, because you are again comparing OA *publishing* and its costs with TA publishing and its costs, whereas I am talking about OA *provision* (through self-archiving). Although the calculations look more concrete, I believe that the probability of eventual overall library savings arising from a conversion to OA journal publishing is even smaller and more remote than the probability of eventual library savings arising from OA self-archiving -- the almost I spoke about earlier -- because the first of these probabilities is based not on what it would cost or save per journal but on the probability that many, most, or all journals will convert to the OA publishing model, and when! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gi Your projected savings look attractive enough, but they are based on a hypothetical large-scale conversion that has neither taken place nor shows signs of taking place. The growth of the number of OA journals reported in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) during the past year (798 OA http://www.doaj.org/ out of about 24,000 peer-reviewed journals http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ in all at the moment) was merely a growth in the *reporting* rate (because no such directory existed previously). Many of those journals have been OA for years now. Once the reporting catches up, we will be able to track the absolute number of OA journals and the number of OA articles they publish, their proportion of total journals and articles -- under 5% today -- and, most important, their rate of growth. Without realistic indications of significant growth I would suggest that your budgetary calculations are rather beside the point. Besides, this has nothing to do with OA self-archiving, for which we *do* have current size estimates (there are at least 3-5 times as many TA articles per year being made OA through self-archiving by their authors today than through being published in OA journals). OA Self-archiving is also growing:
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
In our discussions of OA, I feel there is a need for better terminology to distinguish between the arXiv-like database or repository model, in any of its modifications, and the two types of journals those paid at the reader end, and those paid for at the journal-production end. For journal-production-end journals, I particularly dislike author-paid, as it is not the intention of any of the proponents that the author personally will pay for the publication of the article. I think sponsor-paid also bad, as the research sponsor pays through indirect costs a good deal of the convention system's costs. (And of course the same goes for university-paid, researcher-paid, and so forth). For the current type of journal, library-paid is not really correct, as the library pays from money it receives from elsewhere, (and as it has been proposed earlier that the library might pay the costs of the new system). Reader paid or user-paid is also not right, as the reader or user almost never directly pays. For the various database or repository models, I particularly dislike the term archive, because this is widely used in another meaning, though a closely related one: an ultimate reference copy--which would be only a part of such a system. Database is a very general term, and has been used by the aggregators like Ebsco to mean their databases of journal articles republished from the original journals, which is certainly not the intent. I am not making suggestions, just hoping for them. Arbitrary numerical , color, or place-name designations are out of bounds--we need meaningful names, not code. To distinguish the pseudo-open access as used to mean open access to part of the journal: I think full open access and partial open access are sufficient , and non-pejorative. Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University dgood...@liu.edu (and, formerly: Princeton University Library)
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, David Goodman wrote: In our discussions of OA, I feel there is a need for better terminology to distinguish between the arXiv-like database or repository model, in any of its modifications, and the two types of journals those paid at the reader end, and those paid for at the journal-production end. Open Access (OA) can and should be defined at the article level, not at the journal level. An article is OA if its online full-text can be immediately and permanently accessed (downloaded, stored, printed, processed) toll-free by anyone webwide. That is the BOAI definition of OA: The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By open access to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml The BOAI also lists the two ways of providing OA for articles: BOAI-1 is the self-archiving of articles published in Toll Access (TA) journals in OA Eprint Archives (whether central discipline-based Eprint Archives or distributed institutional Eprint Archives, but preferably OAI-compliant ones, so that they are interoperable and harvestable by OAI services such as OAIster: http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ BOAI-2 is the publishing of articles in OA Journals that do not cover their costs by charging users access-tolls (for the online version). Implicit in all this is the distinction between an OA and TA article, and between an OA and TA journal. (The distinction between an OAI-compliant and a non-OAI-compliant archive is functionally important, but not essential to the definition of OA; the distinction between central and institutional archives is also not essential, though there are reasons why institutional archiving is a more promising way to scale OA up to 100%) For journal-production-end journals, I particularly dislike author-paid, as it is not the intention of any of the proponents that the author personally will pay for the publication of the article. I think sponsor-paid also bad, as the research sponsor pays through indirect costs a good deal of the convention system's costs. (And of course the same goes for university-paid, researcher-paid, and so forth). Journal cost-recovery models are not relevant to the definition of OA. OA is a property of articles -- in particular, whether or not they are accessible toll-free. If they are accessible toll-free, they are OA. This may be because they have been published in and OA journal, or because they have been published in a TA journal and also self-archived. David may have his preferences about journal cost-recovery models, but not only do these have nothing to do with articles that are OA because they have been published in TA journals and made OA by self-archiving, but they have something to do with articles that are OA because they have been published in OA journals only inasmuch as the OA journal must make them accessible toll-free (to be an OA Journal). Apart from that, how the journal chooses to recover its costs is not essential to the definition of OA. And it cannot be repeated often enough: The Open-Access Problem and the Library Serials Crisis are *not the same problem* (although there are some connections). They should not be conflated. For the current type of journal, library-paid is not really correct, as the library pays from money it receives from elsewhere, (and as it has been proposed earlier that the library might pay the costs of the new system). Reader paid or user-paid is also not right, as the reader or user almost never directly pays. Again, David may have his preferences about journal cost-recovery models, but none of this has anything to do with the meaning of OA. It is true, though, that TA refers mainly to institutional library tolls, not individual user tolls. By the same token, publication charges are more likely to be institutional than individual ones. For the various database or repository models, I particularly dislike the term archive, because this is widely used in another meaning, though a closely related one: an ultimate reference copy--which would be only a part of such a system. Database is a very general term, and has been used by the
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
The use of codes in your reply is _exactly_ what I am protesting about. 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/ All this was fine when we were speculating remote from the mainstream, but not when we are reaching the point of public acceptance. That your definitions are not generally understood or accepted is demonstrated by the previous 2 weeks worth of confused discussion about what is and what isn't open access. David Goodman -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: Sun 3/21/2004 9:26 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Cc: Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, David Goodman wrote: In our discussions of OA, I feel there is a need for better terminology to distinguish between the arXiv-like database or repository model, in any of its modifications, and the two types of journals those paid at the reader end, and those paid for at the journal-production end. Open Access (OA) can and should be defined at the article level, not at the journal level. An article is OA if its online full-text can be immediately and permanently accessed (downloaded, stored, printed, processed) toll-free by anyone webwide. That is the BOAI definition of OA: The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By open access to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml The BOAI also lists the two ways of providing OA for articles: BOAI-1 is the self-archiving of articles published in Toll Access (TA) journals in OA Eprint Archives (whether central discipline-based Eprint Archives or distributed institutional Eprint Archives, but preferably OAI-compliant ones, so that they are interoperable and harvestable by OAI services such as OAIster: http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ BOAI-2 is the publishing of articles in OA Journals that do not cover their costs by charging users access-tolls. Implicit in all this is the distinction between and OA an TA article, and between an OA and TA journal. (The distinction between and OAI-compliant and a non-OAI-compliant archive is functionally important, but not essential to the definition of OA; the distinction between central and institutional archives is also not essential, though there are reasons why institutional archiving is a more promising way to scale OA up to 100%) For journal-production-end journals, I particularly dislike author-paid, as it is not the intention of any of the proponents that the author personally will pay for the publication of the article. I think sponsor-paid also bad, as the research sponsor pays through indirect costs a good deal of the convention system's costs. (And of course the same goes for university-paid, researcher-paid, and so forth). Journal cost-recovery models are not relevant to the definition of OA. OA is a property of articles -- in particular, whether or not they are accessible toll-free. If they are accessible toll-free, they are OA. This may be because they have been published in and OA journal, or because they have been published in a TA journal and also self-archived. David may have his preferences about journal cost-recovery models, but not only do these have nothing to do with articles that are OA because they have been published in TA journals and made OA by self-archiving, but they have something to do with articles that are OA because they have been published in OA journals only inasmuch as the OA journal must make them accessible toll-free (to be an OA Journal). Apart from that, how the journal chooses to recover its costs is not essential to the definition of OA. And it cannot be repeated often enough: The Open-Access Problem and the Library Serials Crisis are *not the same problem* (although there are some connections). They should not be conflated.
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, David Goodman wrote: The use of codes in your reply is _exactly_ what I am protesting about. 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/ All this was fine when we were speculating remote from the mainstream, but not when we are reaching the point of public acceptance. That your definitions are not generally understood or accepted is demonstrated by the previous 2 weeks worth of confused discussion about what is and what isn't open access. (1) The definitions of BOAI-1 and BOAI-2 are not mine. (Are you objecting to their content or their color?) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml (2) I would say public consciousness of OA is rising, but to call this public acceptance is rather overstating it, particularly as OA is not in the hands of the public but in the hands of journal article authors and their institutions, funders and publishers. (3) The lion's share of the current confusion about OA is because the recent increase in public consciousness of OA arose partly from unilateral promotion of BOAI-2 (OA publishing), as if OA Publishing were all or most of OA. It is not. Far from it. And the current confusion on that score needs to be corrected, not compounded: On the Need to Take Both Roads to Open Access http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2995.html The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3147.html The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3378.html Stevan Harnad
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, David Goodman wrote: In our discussions of OA, I feel there is a need for better terminology to distinguish between the arXiv-like database or repository model, in any of its modifications, and the two types of journals: those paid at the reader end, and those paid for at the journal-production end. There is a third variety of Open Access Journals which are Externally funded and have no paying involved at either ends (reader or author). The Calicut Medical Journal http://www.calicutmedicaljournal.org funded by the Calicut Medical College Alumni Association and Internet Health http://www.internet-health.org funded by the CCMIR belong to this category. Best regards Dr.Vinod Scaria WEB: www.virtualmedonline.com MAIL: vinodsca...@yahoo.co.in Mobile: +91 98474 65452 EXEC Editor: Calicut Medical Journal www.calicutmedicaljournal.org Editor in Chief: Internet Health www.internet-health.org
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Dr.Vinod Scaria wrote: funded and have no paying involved at either ends (reader or author). The Calicut Medical Journal http://www.calicutmedicaljournal.org funded by the Calicut Medical College Alumni Association and Internet Health http://www.internet-health.org funded by the CCMIR belong to this category. Indian OA journals have been mentioned here before. Where does the external funding come from? Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK.
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Stevan, May I stretch your argumentation a little, just to find out if I understand you well? Would you say: no matter who pays the publication costs and how high they are, as long as the publication is not at the cost of the reader an open access protagonist is satisfied? Leo Waaijers. -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: 22-3-2004 23:02 Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, David Goodman wrote: Though it is obvious that SH and I misunderstand each other on some things, we do not disagree (I think) on the basic issue: that no matter how it is done, the publication should not be at the cost of the reader; the readers' access should be open. We don't quite agree on that either. OA is not defined by who pays the publication costs, how. It is defined (on an article by article basis) by whether or not the article is OA, i.e., accessible toll-free. So it is *not* that: no matter who pays the publication costs, the publication should not be at the cost of the reader but rather: no matter who pays the publication costs, the *access* should not be at the cost of the reader OA is not defined by a publication model or a cost-recovery model. It is defined by *access provision*. I would even add, that if the readers' access to research is not open, it should no longer be considered ethical scientific publication. I would suggest that any toll-access (TA) journal that, in the interests of OA, gives the green light to author self-archiving today is every bit as ethical as an OA journal today. In contrast, any green-journal author who does not take his journal up on it today -- failing to provide immediate OA to his article by self-archiving it, but instead just continuing to call the journal unethical for failing to make the immediate sacrifice and to take the immediate risk of converting into an OA Journal at this time -- is, I would suggest, either not sensible, or no longer to be considered serious in his calls for OA. Notice that I said author. Librarians have other ethical and practical battles to fight, having to do with journal pricing (but not OA). OA provision is in the hands of the research community. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-For um.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html 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 http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Suhail A. Rahman wrote: 1. We have a problem with accessing the scientific literature due to access tolls that make it unreachable for all On this we all seem to agree. Let us call it the Immediate Access Problem. 2. To alleviate this problem the OA initiative says there are two roads: self archiving OA journals. Stevan Harnad strongly believes in self archiving Correct. But it needs to be emphasized that my belief in and advocacy of OA self-archiving are based on solid evidence and reasons, not on faith or disposition: The Immediate Access Problem is a pressing present problem (for those who lack the access), not a leisurely future one. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif There are fewer than 1000 (5%) OA journals at present http://www.doaj.org/ (compared to about 23,000 TA journals: 95%), and, as Suhail correctly points out, not all authors can afford to pay the publication charges even for publishing in those 5% OA journals.. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0048.gif Hence the OA Journal (Golden) Road to OA is too small, slow and uncertain as the *sole* solution to the Immediate Access Problem. Fortunately, there is also another, parallel Road, a larger, faster and surer one, the (Green) Road to OA: that of continuing to publish one's articles in conventional TA journals but also providing OA to those same articles by self-archiving them. OA self-archiving has been practised and tested for far longer than OA journal-publishing (since at least 1990), it has been proven to provide reliable, lasting OA; it has successfully done so for at least three times as many articles per year as are being published per year in OA journals, and it is growing faster than OA journal-publishing (5%) is growing, even receiving an official green light from at least 55% of journals. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif Most important, OA self-archiving, despite the fact that it already provides at least three times as much annual OA today as OA journal-publishing, and despite the fact that it is growing faster, is -- *relative to its true, full, immediate potential to provide OA* -- the far more under-utilized of the two Roads to OA! For it already has the capacity to provide immediate OA to 100% of articles, virtually overnight. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0049.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0051.gif And the two reasons why this immediate 100% OA through self-archiving is not yet being provided by researchers are (1) that far too few researchers and (2) far too few research institutions have understood how and why to do it. Suhail himself is one of those researchers who has not understood self-archiving, and he gives ample evidence of this failure to understand it below: 3. I embraced OA journals warmly in the early 2000's but ignore self archiving for two reasons. a) It isn't needed if OA journals gain popular support. b) We can meanwhile start by self archiving our articles at home (a) and (b) are not only incorrect, but incoherent: (a) With only 5% of journals OA, it makes absolutely no sense to just sit and wait for OA Journals to gain popular support -- if we do indeed agree on the premise (that there is an Immediate Access Problem) -- when the option of providing immediate access to our own research is within our own hands. (b) What on earth is the difference between self-archiving and self-archiving articles at home? Self-archiving one's own TA articles on one's own institutional website *is* self-archiving! http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#distributed-vs-central http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institutional-vs-central 4. I find out that OA journals are not really toll free, they offer different kinds of tolls. I am also afraid that these tolls may lead to a publishing hegemony in the future. Fine. Then that sounds like yet another reason *not* to sit around waiting for OA Journals to gain popular support in order to solve the Immediate Access Problem but to self-archive instead, right now! 5. I argue for a different kind of OA initiative whereby existing journals find a mechanism to offer OA without the necessity for author tolls. Now we are asked to sit around and wait, not for the *actual* OA journals to provide OA, few as they are (5%), because they cover their costs out of author charges that are unaffordable for some authors, but for hypothetical *alternative* OA journals that cover their costs in some hypothetical alternative way (0%). This 2nd-order waiting for an unspecified and hypothetical alternative -- in preference to doing the immediately doable -- does not sound like a very rational way to go about solving the Immediate Access Problem. 6. I give give one possible mechanism, which is
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Stevan Harnad wrote: Hence the OA Journal (Golden) Road to OA is too small, slow and uncertain as the *sole* solution to the Immediate Access Problem. Fortunately, there is also another, parallel Road, a larger, faster and surer one, the (Green) Road to OA: that of continuing to publish one's articles in conventional TA journals but also providing OA to those same articles by self-archiving them. I finally understand what you imply by the green road to OA. But this then brings up one general one personal question: 1. Generally, lets face the fact, I found out specifics about the green road to OA from this forum. Few in the research world take it seriously because even though many have heard about it, few know what it means, much less how to implement it. Why so? 2. Personally, lets predict the scenario into the next twenty to fifty years, assuming problem 1 is rectified: Self archiving is well advanced. Will TA journals not be forced to take the Golden road to OA due to falling subscriptions? If so, are we not just postponing the inevitable for the third world? Suhail
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Suhail A. R wrote: I finally understand what you imply by the green road to OA. But this then brings up one general one personal question: 1. Generally, lets face the fact, I found out specifics about the green road to OA from this forum. Few in the research world take it seriously because even though many have heard about it, few know what it means, much less how to implement it. Why so? I am afraid you still don't understand. The name green road may not be in common parlance, but self-archiving is, and self-archiving is done by even more authors than use the term self-archiving: Please look at the data in the transparencies that were in the foregoing message: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif Do the authors of 250,000 self-archived articles in 2003 sound like few? Would you not say that *doing* it amounts, a fortiori, to taking it seriously? seriously enough to implement it? And look also at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0049.gif That is merely an (under)estimate of the annual proportion of articles that have been self-archived by their authors relative to the number that have been published in OA journals by their authors. As I said, the ratio is at least 3:1. So what is your point? My own point is that 250,000 self-archived articles in 2003, and a ratio of 3:1 are still nothing to crow about, because the total number of articles published in 2003 was about 2.5 million, and *that* is the target. If what you are saying is that the OA message (of either color) has not yet gotten through to the authors of *those* (non-OA) articles, you are quite right. But that is what this Forum is about! Getting that message out. 2. Personally, lets predict the scenario into the next twenty to fifty years, assuming problem 1 is rectified: Self archiving is well advanced. Will TA journals not be forced to take the Golden road to OA due to falling subscriptions? If so, are we not just postponing the inevitable for the third world? Forgive me, Suhail, if in 2004, when there is a pressing Immediate Access Problem for at least 80% of the articles published, that I do not devote time and energy to speculating about what might or might not happen in 20-50 years! The Problem is the lack of access *now*. In 20-50 year, most of those lacking that access *now* will be dead. The immediate problem is providing that access for them *now*, so they can use those research findings *now* to build their own research upon (i.e., research impact). If you insist that I speculate, I can quote the speculations I have already made (and linked for you, in several previous replies) although I find them utterly beside the point at this time. Here they are, again, in longhand: 4.2 Hypothetical Sequel: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm Steps i-iv [see end] are sufficient to free the refereed research literature. We can also guess at what may happen after that, but these are really just guesses. Nor does anything depend on their being correct. For even if there is no change whatsoever -- even if Universities continue to spend exactly the same amounts on their access-toll budgets as they do now -- the refereed literature will have been freed of all access/impact barriers forever. However, it is likely that there will be some changes as a consequence of the freeing of the literature by author/institution self-archiving. This is what those changes might be: v. Users will prefer the free version? It is likely that once a free, online version of the refereed research literature is available, not only those researchers who could not access it at all before, because of toll-barriers at their institution, but virtually all researchers will prefer to use the free online versions. Note that it is quite possible that there will always continue to be a market for the toll-based options (on-paper version, publisher's on-line PDF, deluxe enhancements) even though most users use the free versions. Nothing hangs on this. vi. Publisher toll revenues shrink, Library toll savings grow? But if researchers do prefer to use the free online literature, it is possible that libraries may begin to cancel journals, and as their windfall toll savings grow, journal publisher tollrevenues will shrink. The extent of the cancellation will depend on the extent to which there remains a market for the toll-based add-ons, and for how long. If the toll-access market stays large enough, nothing else need change. vii. Publishers downsize to providers of peer-review service + optional add-ons products? It will depend entirely on the size of the remaining market for the toll-based options whether and to what extent journal publishers will have to down-size to providing only
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
It was very interesting to see some publishers' reactions to OA 1 2 at a meeting I attended recently. The discussion I was present for came down clearly on the side of Open Archives as a preferable (and stable) way forward, even describing it as a safety valve on an overheated system. My impression was that it may 'buy enough time' to allow publishing practices and business models to adapt (and compete!) on a more realistic time scale than those dictated by artificial solutions from funding organisations. There was also discussion about librarians and academics changing their assumptions and expectations, and whether institutional librarians may have to relinquish collections management in the serials world. Les Carr
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Les Carr wrote: It was very interesting to see some publishers' reactions to OA 1 2 at a meeting I attended recently. The discussion I was present for came down clearly on the side of Open Archives as a preferable (and stable) way forward, even describing it as a safety valve on an overheated system. My impression was that it may 'buy enough time' to allow publishing practices and business models to adapt (and compete!) on a more realistic time scale than those dictated by artificial solutions from funding organisations. But that is *precisely* what the green road (BOAI-1) is! A safety-valve on an overheated system: open-access is needed *right now*, but 24,000 journals are certainly not ready or able to go golden (BOAI-2) right now (nor is anyone in a position to subsidise their doing so, right now). The green road can provide that open access (100%) right now -- with the help, right now, of the publishers, who are certainly in a better position to go green than to go gold! This leaves publishers time to adapt -- while at the same time providing immediate open access for researchers, right now. And as publishers adapt (rethink what added-values are still worth adding, and what costs are better worth cutting), it is possible that publisher toll-revenue losses -- and corresponding university toll-savings -- *might* (I repeat, *might*) begin to occur and grow, thereby simultaneously (1) providing the publishers with the impetus to downsize and convert to gold in order to keep meeting costs *and* (2) providing the institutions with the revenue out of which to pay those costs! http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm It is neither a coincidence nor a capitulation (on either side) that publishers are looking more favorably on BOAI-1. It is part of the natural logic and pragmatics of the situation: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif Open Access by Peaceful Evolution International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers Universal Access: By Evolution or Revolution? Amsterdam, 15-16 May 2003. http://www.stm-assoc.org/infosharing/springconference-prog.html [URL apparently dead: there may still be a cached one somewhere!] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2003_12_07_fosblogarchive.html#a107089736737848156 There was also discussion about librarians and academics changing their assumptions and expectations, and whether institutional librarians may have to relinquish collections management in the serials world. Eventually, perhaps, digital librarianship will no longer be about buy-in collections and collection-management (at least insofar as peer-reviewed journals are concerned). But for now, whilst they are still paying the tolls, it's still about managing digital journal collections. Rethinking 'Collections' and Selection in the PostGutenberg Age http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1796.html If libraries want to help in the creation and curation of open-access archives for their own institutional output of published peer-reviewed-journal articles, they can and should. But to do that it is not enough for them to create archives and fret about preservation: They have to realize that content-provision by their institute's researchers is what is needed, that it will only be provided for the sake of the researcher's own impact, and that the carrot/stick of publish-or-perish will probably be needed (from university administrators and government research-funders) in order to induce researchers to do it. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 99 00 01 02 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif Yahoo! Groups Sponsor -~-- Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
That's right. The difference between the actual 7.5%% and the bottom-line 55% (i.e., those who could self-archive today already having the journal's official blessing) is the minimum. In reality, though, much closer to 100% could be self-archiving, leaving the gap between what is immediately possible and what is actual even bigger. (And even for those publishers who officially state that if their author self-archives, they refuse to publish the paper, there is still a legal way for the author to self-archive: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 ). It is for this reason that I have become convinced that the only thing that will ensure that the research community takes advantage of the open access that is within its reach is via a natural extension of the very same policy that ensures that research is published at all, rather than simply put in a desk drawer: Both research institutions and research funders need to extend their existing publish or perish policies to publish with maximized impact -- by making all research publications open-access, via either the golden or green road, i.e., by publishing it in a suitable open-access journal, if one exists, or otherwise by publishing it in a suitable toll-access journal AND self-archiving it in the author's own institutional open-access eprint archives. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ In other words, by implementing the Berlin Declaration: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm Stevan Harnad On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Alastair Dryburgh wrote: Thanks. If I understand correctly, the difference between the potential 55-95% of articles which could be available via self-archiving per the slide and the 7.5% you give below must be due to authors not self-archiving when they could ? Cheers Alastair -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 06:29 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access From: Alastair Dryburgh Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 04:00 To: Sally Morris Subject: Protocols for Metadata Harvesting I continue to think about things like ParaCite being a catalyst in the move towards open access. Are you aware of any estimates of how much of the recent literature is available in published or almost-as-published form outside the subscription wall ? Dear Alastair, The percentage of the annual literatire that is openly accessible varies from field to field. In High Energy Physics it is 100% and in chemistry it is near 0%. There are about 2,500,000 articles published in 24,000 refereed journals acrosss all fields and languages each year. Of this total, about 10% is available as full-text for free online. Of that 10% about 2.5% gets there via open-access journals and the remaining 7.5% via author open-access self-archiving. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif Cheers, Stevan On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Alastair Dryburgh wrote: Stevan Sally Morris suggested you would be the best person to answer the question I had below. Your best estimate ? Best wishes Alastair Dryburgh www.alastairdryburgh.co.uk
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Steve Hitchcock wrote: The authors of this viewpoint in the Lancet seem to have got OAI and Eprints.org muddled: The Open Archives Initiative (http://www. openarchives.org) aims to create a global online archive of all published research and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, part of the UK government's Higher Education Funding Councils of England, Scotland, and Wales.13 Its chief proponent, Stephen Harnad of Southampton University, UK, calls for all research, after publication, to be posted on personal or institutional websites and tagged in a standardised form, making it searchable, navigable, and retrievable. If publishers do not allow authors to post their articles on personal or institutional websites, Harnad suggests they post the submitted draft together with a corrigendum file highlighting the differences between it and the published version. Although this approach is not an alternative to the current subscription-based publishing model, it could improve access within it. Ref 13 Open Archives Initiative. www.eprints.org Site accessed Feb 23, 2003. Pritpal S Tamber, Fiona Godlee, Peter Newmark Open access to peer-reviewed research: making it happen http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol362/iss9395/full/llan.362.9395.editorial_and_review.27694.1 (free registration required) Muddled indeed, and more than just muddled. What these BMC authors can't quite bring themselves to say (being advocates of the golden road rather than the green road to open access) is not only that the green road of open-access self-archiving is indeed a road to *open access* (not merely improved access but *open access*, in the full sense of the word), but that it is a far faster and surer road than the golden one, and the only one open for most of the annual research literature today! The popular press is at the moment in a paroxysm of euphoria about the golden road to open access (open-access publishing), and mute or muddled about the green road (open-access self-archiving). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif When the noise subsides and the air clears we will see the real access landscape more clearly again, and what we will see is that all the euphoria has been about a very small portion of the yearly traffic of 2,500,000 toll-access articles. The 560 golden journals are only conveying about 60,000 of those 2,500,000 yearly articles to open access (i.e., less than 5%). http://www.doaj.org/ The green road is conveying at least three times as many already, and is growing faster (without getting the press fanfare, partly, no doubt, because no product is being promoted, and partly because of just plain simplistic thinking by the press and the public); but even that three-fold greater volume of open access is still a pathetically small portion of the yearly traffic. The difference, though, is that the traffic along the green road can be immediately increased to (at the *very least*) 55% of the total annual 2,500,000, virtually overnight, whereas the traffic along the golden road can only be increased as quickly as we can create, fund, fill and sustain new golden journals, journal by journal. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif I hope we will soon separate the reality from the rhapsodizing, rechannel the welcome new open-access awareness and support, and focus on attaining more open access, now, in the way that is so obviously within our reach. I'm afraid that all this eminently accessible open-access will continue to be needlessly delayed as long as our attention and enthusiasm continue to be directed solely or primarily at the slower road. We should really be promoting both roads, and each in proportion to its immediate capacity to deliver open access. What is happening now is instead rather like trying to increase the population by promoting in vitro fertilization alone, neglecting the faster, surer path... http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif It is certainly true, as the authors of the Lancet article state, that open-access self-archiving is not an alternative to the current subscription-based publishing model. Let us not forget that this is not the alternative-to-the-current-subscription-based-model initiative. It is the *open-access* initiative. And the golden road (with the changes in the subscription model that it requires) is just one of the two roads leading to open access (and not the fastest or surest). http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm The rest is just speculation. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm Stevan Harnad
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
From: Alastair Dryburgh Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 04:00 To: Sally Morris Subject: Protocols for Metadata Harvesting I continue to think about things like ParaCite being a catalyst in the move towards open access. Are you aware of any estimates of how much of the recent literature is available in published or almost-as-published form outside the subscription wall ? Dear Alastair, The percentage of the annual literatire that is openly accessible varies from field to field. In High Energy Physics it is 100% and in chemistry it is near 0%. There are about 2,500,000 articles published in 24,000 refereed journals acrosss all fields and languages each year. Of this total, about 10% is available as full-text for free online. Of that 10% about 2.5% gets there via open-access journals and the remaining 7.5% via author open-access self-archiving. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif Cheers, Stevan On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Alastair Dryburgh wrote: Stevan Sally Morris suggested you would be the best person to answer the question I had below. Your best estimate ? Best wishes Alastair Dryburgh www.alastairdryburgh.co.uk
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
A glib response to the STM publishers' statement (below) as far as open access is concerned would be: so no news there, then. But it raises more important issues. First, it is right to recognise the remarkable progress that journal publishers have made in becoming digital in the last decade or so, as is outlined. The statement welcomes the new open-access publishers, as it should (although it conspicuously avoids the term open access, referring instead to 'wide and continuous dissemination'). But that is just the starting point for where we are now. The statement is a response to the open-access movement as a whole, even though it never mentions open-access author self-archiving directly. Now this element of the open-access model is not predicated against journals or even against toll-access journals, as has often been stated in this forum. It recognises the important role of high quality peer reviewed journals, which the archives supplement. What is needed in response from publishers in statements like the one below is how they can support open-access archiving even if they do not offer open access themselves. Simple measures such as writing into all agreements with authors the right to self-archive their published papers would be a start. Instead, the shortcoming of the statement is encapsulated in its use of the term 'widely accessible' rather than openly accessible. In other words, toll-access publishers want to compete with open-access archives in terms of access, when they could deploy resources more efficiently by focussing on other services that would benefit authors and readers. Open-access publishers such as those we have now focus resources on e.g. peer review, high production values and the production of preservable formats, qualities that are accessible to all. Subscription journals have the same values, but competing in terms of access without offering open access must by definition be wasting resources on effectively preventing access to the majority. It is no longer necessary for this to happen. This statement is an opportunity missed for toll-access publishers to recognise the critical role of open access and of open-access self-archiving and to begin to adjust their business models gradually even if they choose not to be open-access publishers. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif Steve Hitchcock IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 -- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 14:42:11 +0100 From: Lex Lefebvre lefeb...@stm.nl The Hague, 5 November 2003 Following the current discussions in our industry concerning the topic of Open Access, STM issued today the attached press release: Publishers Reaffirm Mission to Make Research Information Widely Accessible. The document was produced in close consultation and with the approval of the STM executive board. With best regards, Lex Lefebvre Secretary General International Association of Scientific, Technical Medical Publishers (STM) Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5 2595 BE The Hague, The Netherlands Tel: +31 70 3140930 Fax:+31 70 3140940 E-mail: lefeb...@stm.nl Website: www.stm-assoc.org Publishers Reaffirm Mission to Make Research Information Widely Accessible The Hague, The Netherlands, 5th November 2003 - The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) announced in a statement today that it believes that broadening and ensuring continuity of information access for researchers, scholars, and practitioners is a critical mission for all publishers. Issued on behalf of its twelve-member Executive Board, the statement continued: Scientific research has never been more accessible than it is today. In recent years, STM publishers have been working closely with scientists, researchers, and librarians to lead the ongoing revolution in the dissemination of scholarly information. We have leveraged emerging technologies and invested hundreds of millions of dollars to make more scientific research information more accessible to more people than ever before. In the process, we have developed - and continue to develop - innovative and accessible business models to broaden information access. Recent developments such as flexible subscription licensing arrangements customised to meet the needs of libraries and consortia; pay-per-view article access at prices within reach of non-subscribing individuals; and implementation of standards such as cross-linking protocols (such as CrossRef) and enabling technologies (such as the digital object identifier) have made seamless navigation and discovery
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Sat, 8 Nov 2003, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote: Thanks very much Gopal. Please forward it to Stevan Harnad, Leslie Chan, Peter Suber and opther champions of Open Access. This is probably the first newspaper editorial on this topic from India. Or did Times of India write about it? Thanks to Arun and Gopal for the copy of the open-access editorial in the Hindu. http://www.hindu.com/2003/11/08/stories/2003110801121000.htm The editorial is of course very timely and useful, because it describes open access and the open-access journals. But it is unfortunately far from being as useful as it could be, for it is in fact merely a direct echo of the proportion of press attention that open-access journal-publishing (the golden road to open access) has been getting in the Western Press. That attention too would be well and good if it were proportionate, with the emphasis being on *open access* itself, rather than only on the golden road to it! For if open access is identified with open-access journal-publishing alone, or even primarily, we overlook the complementary green road to open access (open-access self-archiving of toll-access articles) that is in a position to provide (and is already providing) far more open access, far sooner, and with no attendant certainty. It is satisfying to focus on the triumphs of the golden road; the editorial names all the causes and the desiderata; it echoes the widespread sense of momentum and of nearing the goal. But in reality it is a blueprint for yet another decade of needless waiting for open access! The editorial mentions the relevant figures: 20,000 journals (probably more like 24,000 today, according to Bowker's), 1 million articles every year (probably 2.5 million) and about 550 gold journals (publishing about 60,000 open-access articles yearly). http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ http://www.doaj.org/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2983.html But the editorial does not put 2+2 together! 550/24,000 and 60,000/2,500,000 are *minuscule* ratios, and their rate and likelihood of growth are equally minuscule. And there is still uncertainty about the viability of the golden journal cost-recovery model at this time. So whereas pointing out the growing awareness among both researchers and the general public, at last, of the value and desirability and the possibility of open access, is a good thing, pinning the hopes of attaining open access on the golden road alone, or even primarily, represents a great opportunity lost. At the very end of the editorial, almost as an afterthought, there is indeed a brief mention of the *other* road, the green road. In addition, even when papers are published in conventional journals, the pre-print (and sometimes the post-print) versions can often be placed in open electronic archives to ensure free access. Physicists have been doing this for years and scientists from other disciplines, especially biology and medicine, need to follow suit. But this brief passing mention fails to point out that open-access self-archiving *is* indeed the other road to open access, and the road that *can* bring us (and *is* already bringing us) to open access far faster -- not having to face the obstacle of (1) creating 23,450 new journals, (2) finding a way to fund them, and (3) then persuading the authors of the 2,440,000 yearly articles to submit their work to those journals instead of their established competitors, but facing instead only the one obstacle of (1) persuading the authors of the 2,440,000 yearly articles to self-archive! Nor is it clear enough from this ever-so-brief afterthought, and the relative proportion of space and attention accorded to it in the editorial, that the green road has also already been shown to be navigable, that it already transports at least three times as many articles to open access yearly, and that the traffic is growing faster on the green road than the golden road, mainly because it already has official clearance for at least 55% of the yearly 2,500,000 articles (and can in reality accommodate 100% of them), whereas the golden road can accommodate less than 5% of the traffic today. I would not cavil at this oversight if it were not for the fact that the disproportionate emphasis in this editorial, and so much else that is being written about open access today, misses the opportunity to marshal the mounting enthusiasm for open access to help persuade the authors of those remaining 2,260,000 articles to make them open-access today, by taking the one simple step, already within their reach, of self-archiving them! For the result would not be another decade of golden dreams but a green reality of 100% open access, overnight. Do we really want to continue sitting and waiting waiting passively for the golden road to be enlarged for us, journal by journal, or do we want to fast-forward to open access via the green road in the meanwhile?
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
[This is the reply to a science writer for a forthcoming article on open access.] On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, [identity deleted] wrote: 1) What do you see as the most important reason to allow open access to journals? There are a number of non-reasons, or side-reasons: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0008.gif But there is only one decisive, incontestable reason: to maximize research impact: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0009.gif If you want to know why research impact is the be-all and end-all of research for researchers, their institutions and their funders: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0005.gif Researchers do research (and their research institutions employ them to do it, and their research-funders fund them to do it, and the tax-payers pay their funding) in order that the research results should be read, used, and applied, to the benefit of all of us. That is research impact, and that is why research is done, and supported. Anything that blocks access to those research findings is blocking research impact, hence going against the interests of research, researchers, their employers, their funders, and the tax-payers that fund the funders. 2) Do you see any problems that might result from open access. If yes, what, and how might these problems be addressed. No problems whatsoever. The only problem is how to get there from here. Right now, most of the planet's annual research output (across all fields of science and scholarship) -- about 2,500,000 articles per year -- is published in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals. Of those 24,000 journals, only about 500 ( 5%) are currently open-access journals (gold journals, in the terminology I will explain in a moment): http://www.doaj.org/ Hence only 5% of yearly research output appears in open-access journals. The remaining 95% appears in toll-access journals. The problem is how to make it all open-access, so all that daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly research impact stops being needlessly lost because of access-denial to all those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the access-tolls (subscriptions or license fees): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/slide0024_image124.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0006.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif Waiting for 23,500 toll-access journals to convert to open-access or to be replaced by 23,500 competing open-access journals would be a long (and perhaps endless) wait, but there is another road to open access besides the golden road of open-access journal-publishing, namely, the green road of open-access self-archiving (by authors, self-archiving their own toll-access-journal articles in their own institutional open-access eprint archives): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif The green strategy is BOAI-1, the first of the two open-access strategies of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). The gold strategy is BOAI-2: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml To solve the problem of getting *there* (100% open access) from *here* (under 10% open access) all that is needed is that researchers either publish in a suitable gold journal, if one exists in their field (5%) or they publish in a suitable green journal (one that supports author self-archiving -- at least 55% of journals already do) and also self-archive the article. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif With the help of new open-access publish-or-perish policies on the part of research institutions and researcher funders, as recommended in last week's Berlin Declaration, researchers will be choosing gold and green journals to publish in, which will encourage the remaining white journals to go green (i.e., self-archiving-friendly). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0029.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0029.gif The result will be (1) that research and researchers have open access (though all or even most journals won't yet be gold, only green). Then, if and when -- and no one knows if and when this will happen, because self-archiving is gradual and anarchic, so it will not be clear at what point 100% of the contents of any particular one of the 23,500 green journals are openly accessible, and hence when it would be safe for an institution to cancel its toll access subscriptions -- but if and when toll-access cancellations do start occurring because of competition to the toll-access versions from the open-access versions, this will start generating institutional windfall toll-savings as it also generates journal toll-revenue loses. First journals will cut costs in order to keep making ends
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Dear Stevan Harnad Many thanks for your email in response to the editorial on communicating science in an electronic era. We have posted it on our letters to the editor page (http://www.scidev.net/EditorLetters/) and have also taken the opportunity to post it on a special section of the website that we are launching today on Open Access and Scientific Publishing under 'Feedback and Debate'. In this section (http://www.scidev.net/open_access) we have drawn together resources on access to scientific information in the developing world. It includes: · Up-to-date news, features and opinion articles on the issues surrounding open access and scientific publishing · Descriptions of (and links to) current open access initiatives · Access to free scientific literature · Links to key reports · Comprehensive events section with the latest meeting proceedings and future events. · An opportunity for you to comment and give your views We hope that this guide will be a useful and important resource for all those interested in open access to scientific information, and will provoke further critical thinking and discussion on the key issues. I would therefore be grateful if you could pass this message on to colleagues and friends who might be interested (www.scidev.net/open_access). Also, do let me know if you have any comments on the section. Best regards Katie Mantell Katie Mantell News Editor SciDev.Net 11 Rathbone Place London W1T 1HR United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7291 3695 Fax: +44 (0)20 7291 3697 SciDev.Net - found at www.scidev.net - is a free-access website providing news, views and information on science, technology and the developing world.
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
Dear Katie Mantell: As you requested, I have transmitted widely your announcement about SciDevNet's coverage of open access: http://www.scidev.net/ms/open_access/ As you also ask for my comments, Here they are: (1) The SciDevNet's coverage is very helpful and welcome, but at the moment it is *extremely* lop-sided, covering only one of the two roads to open access -- open-access journal publication -- but not the other road: open-access self-archiving of toll-access journal publications: http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html (2) You do cite the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) but you do not note that the BOAI consists of *two* open-access strategies, of which the second (BOAI-2) is open-access journal publication but the first (BOAI-1) is open-access self-archiving: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml (3) This is an important omission, because in actual numbers, open-access self-archiving is generating far more open access articles per year than open-access journal-publishing, and open-access via this road is also able to grow much sooner and faster. In fact, in all likelihood, the green road of open-access self-archiving is itself also the surest way to reach the golden road of open-access journal-publishing! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0030.gif Complete series: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt (4) This is why it is so important not to represent open-access as merely being synonymous with open-access-publishing! (5) In your key reports and documents, you have mostly BOAI-2 reports and documents. May I suggest adding the following BOAI-1 reports and documents: (i) The BOAI-1 (self-archiving) FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ (ii) The original self-archiving proposal (Okerson ODonnell 1995) http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ (iii) The University self-archiving policy model: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html (iv) The Research-Funder open-access policy model: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ (v) The Berlin Open Access Declaration: http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html (vi) SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist Resource Guide http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html (6) Among Open Access Initiatives could I suggest adding (i) The SHERPA Project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ (ii) The DARE Project http://www.surf.nl/en/themas/print/index2.php?oid=7 (iii) The Australian initiative http://alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2002/10/eprints.html (iv) French initiatives: http://www.tours.inra.fr/tours/doc/comsci.htm (v) The cross-institutional archive, OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ (7) To Open Access Literature I suggest adding: Harnad, S. (2001) The self-archiving initiative http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html Pinfield et al (2002) Setting up an institutional e-print archive http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/intro.html And to links I would add: Core metalist of open access eprint archives http://opcit.eprints.org/archive-core-metalist.html as well as the following resources: Very large harvested cache of open-access arcticles in Computer Science: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs GNU Open-Source Self-Archiving Software: http://www.eprints.org/ Citation-Impact-Measuring Search Engine for Open-Access Achives: http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search Citation-Seeking Engine (looks for open-access full-texts) http://paracite.eprints.org/ American Scientist Forum (discussion of open access since 1998) http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/ Powerpoints for promoting open access: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.ppt http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.htm These recommendations are all intended so as to make the SciDevNet site's contribution to open-access complete, rather than being, as it is now, merely a review of the open-access journal-publishing portion of the overall movements and initiatives toward open access. Sincerely, Stevan Harnad On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Katie Mantell wrote: Dear Stevan Harnad Many thanks for your email in response
