[GOAL] Titanium Killer Apps and OA

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au> wrote:

      I really don’t understand how Stevan manages to call the Titanium
      Road “a technologically supercharged version of the Green Road”, but
      Stevan can explain that statement if he wishes.

 
The Gold Road to OA means the author publishes the paper in an OA journal and
the journal makes the paper accessible free for all online.

The Green Road to OA means the author publishes the paper in any journal and, 
in
addition, the author makes the paper accessible free for all online ("author
self-archiving").

The "Titanium Road" to OA consists of new user tools with which the author can
make the article accessible free for all online ("author self-archiving").

Hence the "Titanium Road" is merely a technologically enhanced version of the
Green Road ("author self-archiving").

There are only two roads to OA (free online access): The journal does it or the
author does it.
 

       The more important issue is that I have failed to get across to him
      that the Titanium Road has nothing to do with researcher
      voluntarism.


Volunteerism means that in order to make their papers OA, researchers have to do
something that they are not currently doing, of their own accord, not because of
an institutional or funder requirement.

Using new tools, voluntarily, is volunteerism.

      The Gold Road does, because unless the researcher is funded by the
      Wellcome Trust or its like, he or she is likely to have to volunteer
      to divert money from his or her research grant to pay the
      author-side fees.


You've missed the much more fundamental volunteer step in publishing in a Gold
OA journal, Arthur: 

Choosing to publish in a Gold OA journal rather than in a non-OA journal.
 

      The Green Road also does, because the researcher has to volunteer to
      undertake unnatural extra work to deposit works in the institutional
      repository through a clunky interface.


The volunteer step in Green OA self-archiving is: Choosing to self-archive.

The "clunkiness" of the interface is a technological matter. Not everyone would
agree that filling out a few obvious form-interface fields (login, password,
author, title, journal, date, etc.) is so "clunky" or "unnatural" in a day when
we are filling out online forms all the time. It's just a few minutes' worth of
keystrokes.

But my friend Arthur is profoundly mistaken if he thinks that the reason why
over 80% of researchers are not voluntarily self-archiving today is because they
find it too "clunky" to do the keystrokes.

I wish it were that simple. But in fact there are at least 38 reasons
researchers why do not voluntarily self-archive
-- http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#38-worries -- and their worry
that doing so might be "clunky" is just one of them (and usually based on never
even having tried it out).

(But I do think that it is his implicit assumption that the real deterrent to OA
is having to do too many keystrokes that makes Arthur think that a new
technology has come along (the "Titanium Road") that authors will find so
effortless, attractive and beneficial, that they will (voluntarily) take to it,
do all their keystrokes in a new way, for a new purpose, and one of the
side-effects will be that their papers will have become effectively OA (i.e.,
accessible online, free for all).

This is what is called a hypothesis. And I certainly wish that Arthur's
hypothesis were to prove true -- that the natural advantages of the Titanium
Technology prove to attract all researchers in all disciplines worldwide of
their own accord so quickly that it closes the persistent 80% OA gap as fast as
Green OA mandates would have done, and that it does so faster than it will take
to persuade the world's funders and institutions to adopt Green OA mandates.

But for my own part, across the last 2 long decades, I have already lived
through far too many high hopes for yet another OA "Killer App" that will "tip"
us to 100% OA in short order (FTP, the web, Arxiv, OAI, EPrints, IRs, SWORD,
etc. etc.). I think it would be a mistake to wait for uptake of this latest App
(Mendeley, etc.), and a mistake to yet again divert OA advocacy time and effort
toward promoting the use and benefits of the Titanium Technology instead of
devoting the lion's share of OA advocacy efforts to promoting Green OA mandates.

      They even hate to deposit a version of the article that they have no
      confidence in (the Accepted Manuscript).


Arthur: Over 80% of researchers hate to deposit any version at all, and don't!
Worries about versions are just one of the at-least 38 reasons researchers don't
deposit, year upon year upon year.

And the point is that all 38+ reasons are groundless. But it is now evident that
it is hopeless to try to persuade researchers of this, one by one, researcher by
researcher, reason by reason, year upon year upon year.

That's why deposit has to be mandated. (That way, only researchers' funders and
institutions need to be persuaded!)
 

      So few of them do it, and they backslide so easily, that the only
      solution is to force them to do it (a mandate). Since mandates rely
      on persuasion of key executives who are themselves usually
      ex-researchers and are transitory, voluntarism is an intrinsic
      thread running through the Green Road.


You are quite right that persuading the key executives of research institutions
and funders to adopt an OA self-archiving mandate is a substantial challenge.
But I think time has shown that it is the challenge that can yield the greatest
OA dividends, the fastest, and that it hence deserves far more time and effort
now than pinning our hopes yet again on trying to promote the adoption of a new
killer-app by researchers. 

The volunteerism in question here, by the way, is the volunteer stroking of keys
by researchers. Of course all human decisions, including institutional executive
ones, are "free-willed" decisions. But casting that as just another variant of
the OA voluntarism problem misses the fact that it is individual researcher
voluntarism that is failing, and that persuading key executives to
(voluntarily!) mandate researcher keystrokes is not quite the same thing.

Wendy Hall (Southampton), Tom Cochrane (QUT) and Bernard Rentier (Liege), after
all, are "key executives", and they have chosen, of their own free will, to
mandate the OA self-archiving (keystrokes). 

One of the key objectives of EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) -- of which Bernard
Rentier is Director (and Tom Cochrane is a Board member) -- is to advise their
fellow key executives at other institutions worldwide on how to mandate the
keystrokes that are the only thing that stands between us and 100% OA.

       I liken the Titanium Road with the situation with Electronic Theses
      and Dissertations (ETDs). Where universities mandate the deposit of
      an electronic copy of the thesis, the deposit rate easily reaches
      completeness (and I mean 100%, not the 80% or so ID/OA mandated
      articles sometimes achieve). It never retreats from that. Why?
      Because the action required of the graduating student is completely
      natural and they’ve always expected to do it. The university simply
      says “instead of depositing two bound copies of your thesis with the
      university before graduating, give us one and an electronic copy”.
      Or in even more enlightened universities “just give us an electronic
      copy”. The student does what is asked, and is even happy that
      copying the files to a CD or DVD is much, much easier than waiting
      for 100s of pages to print, finding a binder who can do black card
      covers and gold lettering, and paying for all of it. The success of
      ETD schemes is that they are natural, and simply electronicize a
      function that is already part of a PhD student’s activity.


This is alas where theorizing gets in our way: 

The reason students deposit theses as mandated is because deposit is
mandated. Volunteer deposit means unmandated deposit. 
And the reason most researchers don't deposit is because deposit is mandated by
fewer than 200 institutions, out of at least 10,000 worldwide! (see ROARMAP). 

Moreover, many of those first 200 mandates are wishy-washy ones, without a clear
indication of what to do and how, and without any mechanism for monitoring
compliance.

Not so with Tom Cochrane's or Bernard Rentier's ID/OA mandates at QUT and U
Liege. And the Liege mandate model, the most effective one of all, designates
deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional
performance assessment: “instead of mailing paper copies or emailing digital
copies of your publications to the university for performance assessment,
deposit one electronic copy in the institutional repository”. 

You, Arthur, are attributing the success to the fact that depositing is
"natural." 

But the real reason for the success is that it is mandatory (in both cases).

The Titanium Technology may prove quite natural to use, but to get everyone to
use it, you would have to mandate it. That's certainly not in the cards. But
mandating deposit is.
 

       So to the Titanium Road, which is directly aimed at existing
      researcher practice and psychology. Every researcher worth a cent
      keeps a record of all their publications (and sometimes their
      unpublished works too).


Are you sure?

But let's suppose that's so. Now let's go on:
 

      Being a person who grew up with computers but still in the Gutenberg
      era, I still have an archive box under the house with paper copies
      of all my early publications, going back to my 1969 PhD thesis and
      several earlier publications. A list of all the publications also
      exists in my curriculum vitae (cv), and I keep both up to date. Did
      any serious researcher do differently then?


I expect that most researchers maintain and update online CVs.

So far so good. Let's go on: 

      But the times are changing. While I may have produced one of the
      world’s early word-processed PhD theses (I wrote the word processing
      software myself too, and took over the university’s mainframe to run
      it off on the console IBM typewriter in night-time hours), I did not
      keep a ‘machine-readable copy’ (it was in several boxes of 80-column
      punched cards). Nowadays that is exactly what I do. I rely on
      electronic apps to keep my recent records.


Few were as advanced as you then, and chances are that not many are as advanced
as you now either; but let's suppose it is so. Let's suppose that researchers
now retain digital versions of both their CVs and the papers they publish.

Nevertheless, 80% of them are not doing the keystrokes to deposit these digital
documents in their institutional repositories unless it is mandated. 

So what next?

       The Titanium Road is predicated on researchers doing just this:
      keeping the records of their publications (full text and citations)
      online and in the cloud.


What percentage of them do you think are doing this now? What percent will be
doing it next year, in 10 years? 

Those are the numbers to beat, if you think this is better, surer and faster to
reach 100% OA than mandating deposit.
 

      The only tiny missing step is access to this huge resource, probably
      rapidly heading for 100% data coverage.


That's like saying there's only one tiny missing step missing in my
perpetual-motion machine!

The problem has been to get authors to make their papers accessible free for all
online -- not to get them to write them, or to write them digitally, or to store
them digitally. They're mostly doing that already,

Now I agree that if all else were indeed in place so that making papers
accessible free for all online really only cost the author one single keystroke,
it would be considerably easier to persuade them to do that one single keystroke
(despite the 38 groundless worries that have been holding them back till now).

But all else certainly isn't in place (in the "cloud"). And your hypothesis
amounts to the hope that it will be in place -- more quickly and surely than
mandating it -- because researchers will adopt the Titanium Killer-App of their
own accord faster than institutions and funders can be persuaded to mandate
deposit!

(Yes, we do indeed disagree, profoundly, on that empirical prediction -- which
doesn't mean that I am against Killer-Apps, Titanic or otherwise. Just that I'm
against waiting for them on the hope that they will be spontaneously adopted
globally fast enough to do the trick. And I'm even more against again slacking
in efforts to promote deposit mandates in favor of promoting new Killer-Apps.)
 

      Emails to the author asking for access are an ‘almost OA’ option,
      just like the ID/OA Green Road,


Emailing the author for an eprint is not what is meant by "Almost-OA". To 
email
the author for an eprint you first need to find there's a paper, find the
author's email address, and email the author to send an eprint. That's a lot of
keystrokes, and a lot of time, for both the requester and the author.

For "Almost-OA" (as defined in our joint paper!) the eprint must first be
deposited in the author's institutional repository (in Closed not Open Access,
otherwise it would be OA, not "Almost-OA") and then the repository's automated
"email eprint request" Button can be used by the requester to trigger an
automated eprint request to the author (all of this requiring just the cut/paste
of the requester's own email address plus one keystroke from the requester to
request and one keystroke from the author to fulfill).

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access
Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating
Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/

But that's all on the premise that the paper has been deposited! For 80% of
papers it has not.

      but increasingly I predict we will see a researcher’s personal
      corpus of work opened to the Internet. That’s OA!


It is indeed. 

Except that it's not happening: 

How many researchers are actually doing this now, worldwide, and how quickly is
it growing? 
 

      Of course computer scientists have long done this on their own
      websites, but computer scientists are able to write html code and
      use web tools, whereas most researchers can’t or won’t waste the
      time to learn.


Indeed computer scientists have been doing it -- ever since they invented Unix,
UUCP and the Net in the '80s, with anonymous FTP. And indeed computer scientists
can and do do a lot more.

But have you not noticed that neither computer scientists' self-archiving
practices since the '80s nor physicists' self-archiving practices since the '90s
have generalized to other disciplines in the 20-30 years that they have been
available  in principle?

That's why we need the mandates!
 

      The new generation of apps such as Mendeley that collect data make
      this as easy as creating a Facebook page, and as I said, it is
      simply electronicizing what they already do, better, simpler, and
      cheaper.


And now, Arthur, it's time for you to do the stats and provide the data to
support your hypothesis and its predictions: How quickly are these apps being
taken up for the purposes you describe, overall, and discipline by discipline,
year by year?

To make your data comparable with the growth data for Gold OA, unmandated Green
OA and mandated Green OA, it will need to be calculated as the percentage of
yearly peer-reviewed paper output made freely accessible online by the new means
you describe, for each discipline, and overall.

It is not logically possible that there are some remarkable growth curves for
Titanium OA burgeoning as we speak -- but I hope you agree that this is an
empirical question, requiring some supporting evidence, before we are persuaded
to divert efforts to promote Green OA mandates that have been shown to work
fast, toward promoting the use of applications that have not. 

      There is no ‘volunteering’, Stevan. The researchers just keep on
      doing what they’ve always done, but optimize it a bit by using
      better tools that become available.


The tool use and optimizing is voluntary, not mandatory. So the empirical
question that has to be asked and answered remains: What is the evidence that
this "optimizing" is actually generating OA, and what do the growth curves look
like (compared to the current alternatives).
 

      I remain optimistic. Unfortunately I cannot point to big major gains
      to match where the Gold Road and the Green Road have reached, but
      then you know me also as a person with sensitive antennae for small
      signals of scholarly revolutions... It is early days yet.


No, Arthur, it's not early days. It's extremely late days, insofar as OA is
concerned. This is not the time to keep waiting, yet again, to see how well some
new piece of technology will do in generating OA. 

It is the time to promote, use and apply the one tested measure that we know
works, rapidly and surely, if only it is adopted. 

And that measure is to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

Stevan Harnad

From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of
Stevan Harnad
Sent: Monday, 19 December 2011 1:10 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Bold predictions for 2012

 

My friend and comrade-at-arms, the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale,
finds that Gold OA publishing is growing too slowly. (He's right.)

 

Arthur also finds that both Green OA self-archiving, and Green OA self-archiving
mandates (ID/OA) are growing too slowly. (He's right.)

 

Arthur predicts that more and more researchers will spontaneously begin to use
enhanced, interoperable, interactive electronic resources (much the way they now
already use word-processing, email and the web instead of typing and paper) so
that the writing, storing and record-keeping of their own articles, and
exchanging them with one another, will become so rich and interdigitated and
natural that it will be functionally equivalent to having deposited them in an
institutional OA repository, free for all.

 

He calls this the "Titanium Road" to OA (though it sounds rather like a
technologically supercharged version of the Green Road to me!).

 

And surely he is right that something along those lines is as optimal and
inevitable as OA itself.

 

The question is: Will its use grow any faster, of its own accord, than Gold or
Green OA have done?

 

Arthur's betting that it will -- and I of course wish he were right!

 

But after 20 years, I have given up completely on researcher voluntarism, even
when it is overwhelmingly in their own best interests. 

 

It was voluntarism that I assumed would bring us universal OA "virtually
overnight" way back in 1994.

 

Technology has been doing nothing but making it easier and easier, and more and
more rewarding, for researchers to provide OA, year upon year, ever since.

 

Yet the ever simpler and more powerful technology has never succeeded in
inducing researchers -- or, rather, has not induced anywhere near enough
researchers (for it has always induced some of them) -- to make their work OA in
anywhere near sufficient numbers to reach that fabled OA "tipping point" that
everyone keeps talking about year upon year.

 

So I will make no predictions for 2012, except to say that if it's a pipe-dream
that voluntarism will ever kick in among researchers of its own accord, there is
still the hope that their funders and institutions will come to their senses and
make OA compulsory, by mandating it, as a condition for being employed and paid
to conduct and report research in the online era -- which ought long ago to have
become the OA era.

 

It is now a matter of tried, tested and demonstrated empirical -- and hence
historical --  fact that OA mandates, if adopted, *do* accelerate the growth of
OA for the research output of the funder or institution that mandated it -- soon
approaching 100%, when it's the optimal mandate (ID/OA, Liege model, as the sole
mechanism of submission for research performance assessment).

 

So the open empirical question now is whether adopting OA mandates will succeed
in kicking in among researchers' funders and institutions in sufficient numbers
-- in the way that providing OA spontaneously failed to do among researchers
themselves.

 

Fortunately, the number of funders and institutions worldwide that need to be
convinced of the benefits of mandating OA is an order of magnitude smaller than
the number of researchers that need to provide OA.

 

And a number of sizeable mandating initiatives among funders at the national
level have already successfully led to mandate adoption (notably among all the
major national funders in the UK, and some at the EU level: see ROAMAP), with
the biggest of all (COMPETES) now under deliberation in the US.

 

And at the global institutional level, there is now Bernard Rentier's and Alma
Swan's EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), established to help guide the universal
providers of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines -- namely,
 universities and research institutions -- in designing OA policies worldwide.

 

So whereas there is no basis for crowing about "tipping points," there is reason
to hope that we may not have to keep waiting for technology to put us over the
top spontaneously via Arthur's "Titanium Road" -- though technology's help in
providing OA and enhancing its benefits is always welcome (and being actively
incorporated into the EPrints and DSpace repository software as well as into the
implementation of OA mandates almost as fast as it is developed).

 

Stevan Harnad

Superannuated Archivangelist

 

 

On 2011-12-18, at 4:12 PM, Arthur Sale wrote:



Richard, you asked what we’d like to see in 2012.

 

I’d like to see more open access journals, and higher prestige attached to 
those
that already exist.  Who wouldn’t?  I’d also like to see more ID/OA 
mandated
institutional repositories. Again who wouldn’t?  But I don’t see either 
strategy
as taking Open Access to the tipping point where a scholarly revolution becomes
unstoppable. Why? Because both strategies are too cerebral, too argumentative,
too technological, and they require at present unnatural actions on the part of
researchers.

 

What I want to predict is a growing number of researchers doing completely
natural things that have always been in their repertoire of work, for example
like keeping a lifetime record of their publications and ephemera. It used to be
a collection of paper, but the social media tools like Mendeley now allow this
to be electronic, and like the silent transition from typewriters to the
admittedly superior word processing software, I predict we will see a silent
transition to online in-the-cloud corpus collections. Making this open access is
technologically trivial, and I have named this the Titanium Road to open 
access:
light-weight, strong, robust and recognises what people actually do.

 

If I can make another prediction, I think that 2012 might just be the year that
we begin to question the copyright position of articles. Despite legal transfer
of copyright (sometimes) most publishers pay only lip-service to their
‘ownership’ and carry out minimal due diligence in their ‘purchase’ in 
return
for services, and researchers respond with total indifference by dispensing
copies of the Version-of-Record as they see fit. Never a week goes by when I do
not see someone post to a list “Can anyone send me a copy of Xxx by Yyy in
journal Zzz?” and it appears they almost always are satisfied by their later
posts of effusive thanks. The law in respect of scholarly articles has to
change, and this might be the year that we begin to see cracks open up.

 

Finally, let me make my last prediction – that 2012 might see us begin to
address the issue of China, and the language barriers that look like being a
major part of the OA spectrum in this decade (2011-2020). The English-speaking
world and the European language speaking world have been happy to live with
English as the lingua franca (what a strange misnomer!), but the 
Asian-speaking
world is not likely to be so accommodating. We shall have to begin to treat open
access as a matter involving automatic translation, at first maybe just for
metadata, but later for the whole article.

 

Richard, you said you’d like to see short posts dominate this list, so I’ve 
been
brief to the point of encryption. I am happy to expand on any of the previous
four paragraphs, recognising that some of them are separable issues. I hope I
have been controversial enough to get some responses.

 

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania, Australia

 






    [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]

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