Introduction:
This article is a critique of:
The "Green" and "Gold" Roads to Open Access:
The Case for Mixing and Matching
Jean-Claude Guédon
Serials Review
30(4) 2004
Open Access (OA) means: free online access to
all
peer-reviewed journal articles.
Jean-Claude Guedon
(J-CG)
argues against the efficacy of author self-archiving of peer-reviewed
journal
articles -- the "Green" road to OA -- on the grounds (1) that
far too few authors self-archive, (2) that self-archiving can only
generate
incomplete and inconvenient access, and (3) that maximizing access and
impact
is the wrong reason for seeking OA (and only favors elite authors).
J-CG suggests
instead that the right reason for seeking OA is so as to reform the
journal
publishing system by converting it to OA ("Gold") publishing (in which
the
online version of all articles is free to all users). He proposes
converting to
Gold by "mixing and matching" Green and Gold as follows:
First, self-archive dissertations (not published, peer-reviewed journal
articles). Second,
identify and tag how those dissertations have been evaluated and
reviewed.
Third, self-archive unrefereed preprints (not published, peer-reviewed journal
articles). Fourth,
develop new mechanisms for evaluating and reviewing those unrefereed
preprints,
at multiple levels. The result will be OA Publishing (Gold).
I reply that this is not mixing and matching
but merely
imagining: a rather vague conjecture about how to convert to 100% Gold,
involving no real Green at all along the way, because Green is the
self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed articles, not just dissertations and preprints.
I argue that rather than yet another 10 years
of
speculation
http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml
what is actually needed (and imminent) is for
OA
self-archiving to be mandated by research funders and institutions so
that the
self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed journal articles (Green) can be fast-forwarded to 100% OA.
The direct
purpose of OA is to maximize research access and impact, not to reform
journal
publishing; and OA's direct benefits are not just for elite authors but
for all
researchers, for their institutions, for their funders, for the
tax-payers who
fund their funders, and for the progress and productivity of research
itself.
There is a complementarity between the Green
and Gold
strategies for reaching 100% OA today, just as there is a
complementarity
between access to the OA and non-OA versions of the same non-OA
articles today.
Whether 100% Green OA will or will not eventually lead to 100% Gold,
however,
is a hypothetical question that is best deferred until we have first
reached
100% OA, which is a direct, practical, reachable and far more urgent
immediate
goal -- and the optimal, inevitable and natural outcome for research in
the
PostGutenberg Galaxy.
Critique:
All highlighted
quotes are from J-CG's
article (for full context
see http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/mixcritcont.htm):
"Recent
discussions on Open Access (OA) have tended to
treat OA journals and self-archiving as two distinct routes"
From the day it was coined in 2001 by the
Budapest Open
Access Initiative (BOAI),
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
"Open Access" has always been defined
as free online access, reachable by two distinct routes, BOAI-1, OA
self-archiving ("Green") and BOAI-2, OA journals ("Gold"):
To
achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two
complementary strategies.
I. Self-Archiving: First, scholars need
the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in
open
electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When
these
archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative,
then
search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one.
Users
then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in
order to
find and make use of their contents.
II.
Open-access Journals:
Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals
committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to
make the
transition to open access. Because journal articles should be
disseminated as
widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright
to
restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they
will use
copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the
articles they
publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will
not
charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for
covering
their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this
purpose,
including the foundations and governments that fund research, the
universities
and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by
discipline or
institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale
of
add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or
cancellation of
journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even
contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to
favor one of
these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no
need to stop
looking for other, creative alternatives.
Open access to
peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a
new
generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this
goal.
"Some...
even suggest that [self-archiving] alone can bring
about full Open Access to the world's scientific literature"
OA's focus is only on peer-reviewed journal
articles --
2.5 million annual articles in 24,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and
scientific
journals --- not on "the world's scientific literature" in its entirety
[i.e.,
not books, magazines]).
(1) To self-archive one's own article is to
provide Open
Access (OA) to one's own article. Every author can do this, for every
one of
his articles. If/when every author does this, for each of the annual
2.5
million articles, we have, by definition, 'full Open Access' (Green).
(2) By the same token, if/when every publisher
of each of
the 24,000 journals converts to OA publishing, we have, by definition,
'full
Open Access' (Gold).
The rest is simply a question of probability:
Is it more
probable that all or most journals will convert to OA, or that all or
most of
their authors will self-archive their articles? Which faces more
obstacles,
costs, delay, uncertainty, risk? Which requires more steps? Which can
be
facilitated by university and research-funder OA mandates? Which is
already
within immediate reach?
"[S]elf-archiving
is not enough... the repositories [need]
some branding ability"
Self-archiving is not enough for what? Would
100%
self-archiving not correspond to 100% OA (just as 100% OA journals
would)?
And as we are talking about the self-archiving
of
peer-reviewed, published journal articles, why is there a need for
"branding"?
Branding what? The journal articles? But those are already branded -- with the name of the journal
that
published them. What is missing and needed is not branding but Open Access to those journal articles! (J-CG's
preoccupation with branding will
turn out to be a consequence of the fact that he is not proposing a way
to make
current journal articles OA, but a way to replace current journals
altogether.)
"[Providing
branding ability to the self-archiving
repositories] will eventually bring about the creation of overlay (or
database)
journals"
It is very easy to imagine how OA journals (and
indeed
non-OA journals) might one day evolve into mere "overlays" on their OA
articles, which are all self-archived in OA Archives by their authors.
The OA
journal could provide the peer-review service, and certify its outcome
with the "brand, " namely, its journal-name.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2
But right now, this is merely a speculation
about what
could possibly happen, some day. Today, only 5% of journals are OA
journals,
providing 5% OA; and 15% OA is provided by author-self-archiving of
articles
published in non-OA journals. And 0.01% of journals (whether OA or
non-OA) are "overlay journals. "
What is accordingly needed today is 100% OA --
not "branding", nor conjectures about how journals might somehow, some
day, evolve
into "overlay" journals.
The notion that the self-archiving of
published, "branded" journal articles to make them OA is somehow not
"full OA" -- because it
lacks "branding" and awaits "overlay journals" -- represents a rather
profound
misunderstanding of both self-archiving and OA.
"Historically,
Open Access (OA) emerged largely as a
reaction to the fast increasing prices of scholarly and scientific
journals"
Historically, the journal pricing/affordability problem drew attention to the access/impact problem, but OA itself certainly was not a reaction to the journal pricing/affordability problem. The first ones to provide OA (long before 'OA' was defined, and long before OA journals existed) were researchers themselves, self-archiving their articles as a reaction to the new possibilities opened up by the Internet. Two prominent early cases of OA self-archiving are well known -- physics (300,000 papers to date) http://arxiv.org/ and computer science (500,000 papers to date) http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs -- but in fact there is now evidence that a good deal of self-archiving has been going on for at least a decade now in just about all disciplines:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
All this OA self-archiving has been going on as
a natural
reaction to the access/impact problem by researchers -- most of them
not even
aware of the pricing/affordability problem, although there is a causal
connection, of course. (If the online version of all journals were
affordable
to all research institutions, then there would be no access/impact
problem, and
hence no need for OA self-archiving.) But it is not true that OA
self-archiving
emerged as a reaction to the fast increasing prices of scholarly and
scientific
journals. It emerged as a reaction to the obvious potential of the Web
to
maximize the access to and the impact of research findings.
"The
concern, first expressed by librarians, was that the
high prices of journals obviously limited access by economic means...
issues of
access have [since] been increasingly distinguished from issues of
costs (or
affordability)"
Librarians were the first to draw attention to
the
pricing/affordability problem, but the access/impact problem was
already felt
by researchers, and they were already doing something about it, on
their own
initiative, thanks to the advent of the Net and Web.
(It was in fact the library community that
implicitly
mixed up the affordability and access problems, especially in the OA
context,
and these are only lately beginning to be unmixed, at last.)
"In
parallel, Open Access has been increasingly focusing
on articles [rather than just] journals... [partly because] scientists
as readers
tend to pay more attention to articles"
Users have always focused on articles, not
journals. The
OA movement has been increasingly re-focusing on article self-archiving, having
temporarily forgotten it. The
research (author) community has not only not forgotten article
self-archiving,
but has been doing it, not only in parallel with the OA movement, but
well
before it, and with no explicit focus on journal affordability. It just
has not
been doing enough of it yet.
"digital
publishing maintains the journal titles mainly
for branding reasons"
It is very difficult to put a comprehensible
construal on
the foregoing sentence:
'Digital publishing'? What sort of entity is
that?
(Journal publishers? They publish both paper and online editions of
their
journals.)
Maintaining journal titles for branding
reasons? What
does that mean? Journals publish journals, and their journals have names, and their authors and users recognize
those names
and their associated track records (and impact factors), and use them
in
deciding which journal to publish in and which journal-articles to
read. The
service provided by the journal includes peer review, publishing
(online and
on-paper), dissemination, and (to an extent) archiving (of the online
version).
What has this to do with the proposition that
'digital
publishing maintains the journal titles mainly for branding reasons'?
(This is
in fact the first sign of a speculation that J-CG will be making later
in his
paper, about a hypothetical day when journals will become mere
"overlays" of
some kind.)
"the
bundling strategies used by several major publishers
tend to rest about equally on number of titles and number of articles"
Researchers focus on access to articles because
it is
articles that they write, publish, read, use and cite. This has next to
nothing
to do with publishers' bundling strategies. Nor does OA.
"in
Budapest... 2001... two approaches [to OA were
described]: First...Open Access journals... Second, 'self-archiv[ing]'"
(There is a minor historical error here: OA
journal
publishing (BOAI-2, "Gold") was not the first of the BOAI routes to OA
but the
second. OA self-archiving of articles published in non-OA journals
(BOAI-1, "Green") was the first.)
"[OA
journal publishing] amounts to a reform of the
existing publication system [relying] on journals as its basic unit...
and... aims at converting [to] or creating... Open Access journals."
Both
OA
self-archiving and OA journal publishing (and indeed, OA itself, and
the
definition of OA) "fundamentally rely on journals as [their] basic
unit"
because it is the articles in peer-reviewed journals that are the
target literature
of the OA movement.
It is true, however, that only BOAI-2, OA
journal
publication (Gold), aims at a reform of the existing publication
system.
BOAI-1, OA self-archiving (Green), is neutral about that.
It aims only at OA.
"[S]pirited
debates have... centered on the viability
of the "author pays" model"
Unfortunately, these spirited debates, centered
on the
viability of OA Publishing (BOAI-2, Gold), have been both perceived and
portrayed as debates on the viability of OA itself, at a considerable
cost in
lost time and lost OA (for having all but forgotten
about BOAI-1, OA self-archiving,
Green).
There has been a plus side to this
disproportionate focus
on OA publishing: it has drawn a good deal of attention to OA,
especially among
those who are more interested in economic problems and iniquities. But
I am not
sure that this plus altogether compensates for the minus, which is that
this
disproportionate focus on OA publishing has not generated very much OA.
Instead, it has drawn attention and energy away from OA self-archiving,
which
has the immediate potential to generate 100% OA virtually overnight,
institutional OA archives being incomparably cheaper, faster and easier
to
create than OA journals. During all that "spirited debate" about the
viability
of the "author pays" model we could instead have been informing authors
that
they themselves can provide this OA they purport to want and need so
much -- by
simply self-archiving their own published articles.
But perhaps the spirited debate on the
viability of
BOAI-2 was needed for everyone to come to realize in the end
that it is BOAI-1 that is in
the
immediate position to provide 100% OA, and hence needs to be mandated
by
research institutions and funders.
"[F]inancial
viability [of OA publishing] rests on
the will of governments ... and varies... with... country and
circumstances"
All the new and converted OA journals are
valuable and
welcome, but their numbers and the rate of increase of their numbers
has to be
realistically noted: About 5% of journals are OA ("Gold") journals
today
(1400/24,000). In contrast, about 93% of journals are "Green" -- i.e.,
they have
given their authors the Green light to self-archive their articles if
they
wish. The rate of increase in the number of Green journals has been
incomparably faster than the rate of increase in the number of Gold
journals in
the past few years. The amount of OA (15%) generated via self-archiving
has
also been three times as great as the amount of OA generated via OA
publishing
(5%); and (although direct measures have not yet been made) it is
likely that
the rate of growth of OA via OA self-archiving is also considerably
higher than
the rate of growth of OA via OA publishing -- for obvious reasons that
have
already been mentioned: It is far easier and cheaper to create and fill
an
institutional OA Archive than to create and fill an OA journal.
Moreover, there
is a considerable financial risk for an established journal in
converting to
the OA cost-recovery model, which
has not yet been tested long enough to know whether it is sustainable
and
scaleable.
So whereas all new and converted OA journals
are welcome,
it makes no sense to keep waiting for or focusing on them as the main
source of
OA. The real under-utilized resource is OA self-archiving --
underutilized even
though it already provides three times as much OA as OA journals and is
probably growing faster too: because OA self-archiving is already in a
position
to provide immediate 100% OA, if only it is given more of our time,
attention
and energy.
It is unrealistic to imagine that the reason the number of new and converted
gold
journals is not growing faster is that governments are not willing to
subsidize
them! It is not clear whether governments should even want to subsidize them,
at
this point, when OA is already reachable without any need for subsidy, via
self-archiving, and researchers are simply not yet ready to perform the few
keystrokes required to reach for it (even for the 93% of their articles
published in
green journals) despite being alleged to want and need OA, despite being
willing (in
their tens of thousands!) to perform the keystrokes to demand it from their
publishers --
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3061.html -- and
despite the fact that the benefits of OA itself are intended mainly for
researchers
and research.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
If government intervention is needed on behalf
of OA,
surely it is needed in order to induce their researchers to provide the
OA that
is already within their reach to provide, rather than to subsidize
journals to
do it for them.
"[In]
the United States, such governmental
intervention may sometimes seem problematic especially from the
perspective of
the publishing business"
If OA is a desirable enough thing, and
reachable,
government should certainly intervene to see that it is reached, if it
can.
Making government funding available to pay the costs of publishing in
OA
journals is fine, but that cannot generate much immediate OA (5%). In
contrast,
mandating self-archiving can generate 93% immediate OA at the very
least! Hence
it is not clear why we keep indulging in this "spirited debate" on
governments
subsidizing OA publishing costs when governments could be generating at
least
93% immediate OA by simply mandating self-archiving (for
government-funded
research).
And that is exactly what the US and UK
self-archiving
mandates have proposed to do: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
"Deceptively
simple to describe...the
"self-archiving" strategy appears much more complicated and subtle
when approached conceptually"
I will try to show that self-archiving is
exactly as
simple as it purports to be, and that what confuses the picture is
merely the
unnecessary complications introduced by speculating (gratuitously) about the need for
reforming the
publishing system (instead of concentrating on the non-speculative need
for
providing OA).
"[OA
self-archiving] both relies on, and forgets about,
journals"
As will now be demonstrated, it is not OA
self-archiving
that forgets that OA self-archiving is the self-archiving of
peer-reviewed
articles published in non-OA journals: Rather, it is those who
speculate about
the ultimate need for a conversion to OA publishing who keep forgetting
that OA
self-archiving is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles
published in
non-OA journals.
"[For
self-archiving] the article [is the] fundamental
unit [and] journals matter only to differentiate between peer-reviewed
articles
and non-peer-reviewed publications and to provide symbolic value"
Symbolic value?
Consider how much simpler and more straight-forward it is to state this
theory-independently: Today, most
of the 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 peer
reviewed
journals are inaccessible to many of their potential users because they
cannot
afford access. If the articles are made accessible free online (by
self-archiving them), this problem is solved.
I need not theorize about why users want to use peer-reviewed journal
articles. I
can take that as a rather obvious premise. Yes, users want the
peer-reviewed
articles (and the journal's name tells them which ones those are); and
peer
review itself provides the 'value' they seek in an expert-vetted
literature rather
than an unfiltered free-for-all. There is no need to debate the value
of peer
review in an OA context: One of the premises of the OA movement is that OA is about
access to the
peer-reviewed journal literature, not access to something else. So
peer-review
and the journal-names come with the territory. The only problem to
solve is access. And
Open Access solves that. And self-archiving is
by far the fastest and surest way to provide immediate OA.
No further theorizing, or complicating, is
needed: We have
peer-reviewed journal articles, but we don't have Open Access to them.
Self-archiving them provides that access. End of story. The rest is
merely
speculation (needless speculation, needless complication), needlessly
delaying
OA.
"If
I archive an article published in Cell, it still
benefits from the Cell branding effect... [which is also] associated
with... [its]
impact factor"
But what is the point being made here? Of
course my
purpose in self-archiving my Cell
article (Cell is a
Green journal,
by the way) is to add
to (1) the
impact I already get from having successfully published it in Cell and thereby successfully reached those
potential
users who can afford
access to Cell, (2)
the further impact
that I would otherwise have lost, from all those would-be users
who cannot read, use
and cite my Cell
article because they (their institutions, actually) cannot afford to access it.
Why all this theorizing about 'branding'
effects? Cell is the name
("brand") of the journal. Cell has built up, across the years, a
track-record for
selectively publishing articles of a certain quality level (by
applying, across
the years, peer-review standards of a certain quality level). So the
reason
authors prefer to publish their articles in Cell (rather than a lower-quality journal, or
no journal
at all) is to meet, and show they meet, Cell's established quality-standards. And the
reason
users prefer to use articles published in Cell (rather than a lower-quality journal, or
no journal
at all) is because they prefer to devote their limited reading time to
reading -- and to risk their limited research time in using and trying
to build upon --
articles published in Cell
(rather than a lower-quality journal, or no journal at all).
Nothing changes with self-archiving, except
that access,
and hence impact, are maximized -- for the same articles, in the same
journals.
"journals
are useful mainly to the researcher-as-author;
the author-as-reader... cares mainly about articles and pays attention
to
journals only... to help guide... reading choices. 'Self-archiving'
consequently proceeds in parallel to, and largely independently from,
journals.
It acts 'as a supplement to toll access' and not as a substitute"
I cannot follow this argument, and I suspect
that one
must be in the grip of some theory in order to see any point here: The
journal,
which provides the peer-review and certifies its outcome as having met
its
established quality standards, performs exactly the same kind of
function for
both the author and the user! It tags the work as having met a known
quality
standard. The author chooses in which journal to (try to) publish his
article
on the basis of the journal's quality track-record, and the user
chooses which
article to read and use on the basis of the journal's quality
track-record.
Hence the self-archived version of the article
is
precisely as described above: a supplement
to the toll-access version, for those who cannot afford to access it,
not a substitute for
it (for those who can). This is only unsettling
for someone who is in thrall to a theory to the effect that what
researchers
really want and need is a substitute!
This is just one step away from declaring that OA itself is in fact
not enough: What we really want
and need is
OA publishing. And that
would
come rather close to undermining the entire case for OA, making it a
mere
accessory to a hypothesis about the optimal publishing system, rather
than an
end in itself.
("Not enough for what?" one is inclined to ask?
Was Open
Access meant to provide Open Access or something else -- like a
solution to the
pricing/affordability problem, perhaps? and/or a reform of journal
publishing?
The right reply is: Hypotheses non Fingo!
Open Access was meant
to provide Open
Access!)
"journals
might become (negatively) relevant again only
when and if they implement policies that make 'self-archiving'
difficult or even impossible"
I am not sure what is meant here, but I suspect
it is
something like: "If Green journals had not become Green, or if they
changed
their minds..." This is again a counterfactual speculation. One can of
course
counter-speculate that if publishers had not given self-archiving the
Green
light, authors could have, and would have, self-archived anyway.
Fifteen
percent had been doing it already, some since the early '90s. But I
think it is
far more sensible (and more productive of OA) to leave off speculating
and
counter-speculating and instead get to work actually generating the OA
that is
within reach.
As to publishers changing their minds about
giving
self-archiving the Green light: It was difficult enough, in the light
of the
demonstrated benefits that self-archiving confers on both authors and
users
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
(i.e., on researchers and research), for publishers not to give it the
Green
light today (and 93% have done so already) http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html
. As OA grows (and is mandated) it
will only become more difficult
not to
give it the Green light, let alone try to withdraw the Green light:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32.Poisoned
"'self-archiving'
is a strategy that has been designed
by researchers and for researchers, with little interest for any other
player
involved in scientific publishing"
But really, isn't the content of the 24,000 peer-reviewed research
journals -- the
annual 2.5 million articles -- mostly research conducted and reported
by
researchers for users (mostly again researchers) who wish to use, apply
and
cite it? Other "players" do play a role in this too. (Publishers add
value;
librarians provide valuable service.) But doesn't the purpose of Open
Access to
this research output concern mainly its providers and users (including
their
institutions and funders), rather than other 'players'?
"[Self-archiving]
simply aims at improving the research
impact of established scientists and little else"
This is dead wrong (and startlingly so!). The
purpose of
self-archiving is to maximize every user's access and every
author's impact! Why on earth
would one imagine that the benefits of
OA would be reserved for "established scientists" alone? If anything,
maximizing impact and access stands to benefit less-established
researchers
even more than more-established ones!
"If
[self-archiving] should help (or hurt) other
categories or people, so be it, but it is neither its concern nor its
worry. It
is a tough-minded vision, narrowly focused on scientific communication.
Supporters of this vision are essentially interested in only one thing:
extracting every ounce of impact a published article may hope to claim"
And the above is a rather tough verdict -- but
without
giving even a clue of a clue as to who would be hurt by maximizing access and impact through
OA
self-archiving!
Having pointed out that all authors and users
benefit,
who are the "players" who lose? Publishers? There is no evidence of
that, just
speculation (for which there is equally plausible counter-speculation
that the
system can adapt naturally if the need should ever arise). Librarians?
How? In
not providing them with a solution to the pricing/affordability
problem? But we
cannot solve all problems at once. World hunger continues too, and is
more
pressing. Moreover, one would think that library budgetary problems
could only
become less pressing, not
more-so, in a
100% self-archiving world, where the supplementary OA version is
available to
all as a safety-net.
"the
"Gold" and "Green" strategies
are generally treated as parallel approaches by both sides... little
attention
has been paid to the ways in which they might relate to one another"
The reason little attention is paid to how
Green and Gold
might relate and interact is that this calls for speculation, and the
non-speculative facts are in far more urgent need of action. We need to
promote
both OA self-archiving and OA journal publishing (but in proportion to
their
capacities to deliver immediate OA, which are currently about 95 to 5,
respectively).
One can speculate on the possible, eventual
interaction
between Green and Gold (and I confess I too have in the past done so);
but
speculating is not an optimal use of time when OA has been within reach
for a
decade http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html -- a decade that we have instead spent mostly
speculating!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm
"the
"Green" side [has] suggest[ed] that [Green
and Gold] might be in some form of competition"
This requires some corrective context: What has
actually
happened is that the Gold side has for several years been receiving
most of the
attention, even though Gold can only deliver 5% immediate OA, and even
though
proponents of Gold tend to completely ignore the Green option -- to the
point of
speaking about and arguing for OA as if OA were synonymous with OA
publishing
(Gold)! It is in this context -- but particularly because Green has the
(unexploited and overlooked) power to generate immediate 95% OA that it
has
become necessary for the advocates of Green to compete for attention
with the
proponents of Gold! Competing for attention has required pointing out
quite
explicitly that devoting more attention and energy to Gold than to
Green,
instead of in proportion to their respective power to deliver immediate
OA, is
in fact disserving the interests of OA (because it is!).
"Treating
the "Green" and "Gold"
approaches as separate and in competition... is not
useful...,potentially divisive
and could ultimately weaken the Open Access movement"
The two approaches are in competition for
whatever time,
resources and energy we have to devote to OA. So far, that time,
resources and
energy have not been invested in Green and Gold in proportion to their
respective capacity for providing a return on the investments -- i.e.,
their
capacity for delivering immediate OA. That
is not useful (for OA); and efforts to redistribute the available time,
resources and energy stand to benefit OA. What could weaken the OA
movement is
failure to make progress toward OA, or needlessly heading in an
inertial
direction that can deliver far less OA than the alternative direction.
I think
the evidence and arguments for the respective probabilities and
powers of
Green and Gold need to be pointed out, rather than suppressed in an
effort to
preserve an ecumenism (and one-sidedness) that is far from optimal for
OA.
"Rather
than favoring one approach exclusively at the
expense of the other, Open Access promoters should design better
strategies by
making use of both approaches simultaneously"
That sounds constructive, but it does seem to
imply that
the status quo is that Green is being favored at the expense of Gold,
whereas
the reality is quite the reverse: that Gold has been vastly favored at
the
expense of Green, for several years now! And Green is currently working
to
readjust the overall energy investment so it is more in proportion with
each
approach's immediate capacity to deliver OA.
"Stevan
Harnad... summarizes the [Science and Technology
Committee] recommendations as follows:
1.
Mandate author-institution self-archiving of all
UK-funded research output (and fund and support the practice, as needed)
2.
Fund author-institution costs of publishing in OA
journals.
3.
Encourage the transition to OA publishing and study it
further.9
...particularly
prais[ing] the fact that... the only
"mandatory" recommendation [is self-archiving]"
This is a correct summary of what I said. What
is omitted
is only the fact that the actual outcome of the report is very
different from
the language with which the inquiry was launched: The original Call for
submitted evidence was 100% biased toward Gold, making no mention of
Green
whatsoever: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm.
It took "Open Access" to mean "Open
Access Publishing," and called for evidence to be submitted on the
question of
the need to reform the publishing system. It must be noted [with no
irony] that
this original position would be far more congenial to J-CG -- and his
own
theory about what the problem is and what the solution needs to be --
than was
the actual outcome, which was to recommend mandating Green and to
merely
encourage and fund further experimentation with Gold. This was indeed a
surprising turn of events; it was clearly a result of the committee's
evaluation of the actual evidence submitted in response to its Call,
rather
than just a re-assertion of its original terms; and it may represent a
historical turning point in the fortunes of both Green and OA!
"[Harnad
points out that] the two roads... compete for rare
resources and [he suggests that] ... money should be diverted to the
"Gold" road only in proportion to its (very limited) usefulness"
The 12-point summary of my argument that
precedes the
above quote is largely accurate. I would add only that it is not so
much the funding that needs
to be more rationally distributed to the
two roads to OA but rather our time, attention and action. It is the Golden road that needs a lot
of money (to
create and support new OA journals, to fund author-institution OA
publication
charges, to encourage non-OA journals to convert to OA). The Green road
hardly
requires any money at all: Creating an institutional archive is
extremely cheap
(about a $1000 linux server, a couple of days of sysad start-up-time,
and a
couple of hours a month maintenance time -- plus the few dozen
additional
keystrokes per paper it takes to self-archive the paper (over and above
the
keystrokes it takes to write it and submit it for publication): http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
).
Hence the resource the Green road competes for
is not
money, but action: authors need to perform those keystrokes, and their
institutions and funders need to adopt policies that mandate that they
do so
(for their own good -- if OA is indeed the desideratum it is purported
to be!).
So money is a red herring. What Green (and OA)
needs is
less rumination on Gold and its financing, and the long-term future of
publishing, and more action on Green and the immediate future of OA
(and
access, and impact).
"The
problem with the self-archiving argument is that,
until now at least, its results are unimpressive"
OA self-archiving's results to date are indeed
unimpressive. I don't disagree at all -- but compared to what? Certainly not compared to the results of
OA
publishing, since OA
self-archiving has
generated 3 times as much OA as has OA publishing and is probably
growing much
faster too. Green is only unimpressive relative to its own
immediate
potential for generating OA,
which is at
least 93%, compared to Gold's 5%. In that respect, it can be said that
Gold, at
5%, is much closer to its full immediate growth potential, whereas
Green, at
15%, is not. But surely the remedy for that is to devote more time,
attention
and energy to exploiting Green's full immediate potential! That is what
the
impending self-archiving mandates will do. In the meanwhile, however,
it would
help if (1) less time and attention were devoted exclusively to Gold,
as if OA
publishing and OA were the same thing, and if (2) the Gold option were
always
balanced by pointing out the Green option too.
(Green has for several years now adopted the
unified OA
provision strategy: 'If there is a suitable Gold journal for your
paper,
publish it there; if not, publish it in a Green journal and
self-archive it.'
Just taking that step of fairly presenting the two options at all times
would
go a long way toward redressing the imbalance between Gold and Green.)
"The
"self-archiving" side describes its own
strategy as a smooth, yet anarchic, way to Open Access [but, as we will
see] it
creates documentary lacunae that are fatal to the whole project"
(1) The fact that OA self-archiving grows
anarchically,
article by article means that it is uncertain whether and when 100% of
a
particular journal is 100%
OA. If
journal OA instead grew in an all-or-none way, journal by journal, it
would be
easier to decide when and where to cancel.
(2) Self-archiving creates 'documentary lacunae'? A more
theory-neutral way to describe it is as filling lacunae (with OA)!
"As
a result, librarians looking for credible
alternatives... have not been convinced"
Librarians are looking for credible
alternatives to what?
and for the sake of what? Journal affordability? But researchers do not
and
will not provide OA to their articles for the sake of journal
affordability --
though they just might possibly do it
for the sake of maximizing the usage and impact of
their
articles. And researchers are the ones who need to be convinced, not
librarians, as researchers are the only ones who can provide OA to
their
articles (whether by publishing
them in a
Gold journal or by publishing them in a Green journal and
self-archiving them.)
"Yet
[librarians] often are the ones left with the duty
of organizing institutional repositories"
The duty of organizing institutional
repositories? All
that needs to be done with institutional OA archives is to set them up
(and
sysads do that -- see above).
http://www.eprints.org/jan2004/
Then the only remaining "duty" is to fill them -- and only researchers can do that
(though
librarians can certainly help!):
http://eprints.st-andrews.ac.uk/proxy_archive.html
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do
"More
important still, a majority of scientists have not
been swayed either"
Not just more
important: most
important. Indeed
the problem of "swaying" researchers to provide the OA that they are
purported
to want and need so much is the only
real challenge for OA. And it is already clear what will meet that
challenge:
(1) Empirical evidence of the OA impact advantage
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
plus (2) an OA self-archiving mandate on the
part of researchers'
institutions and research funders to ensure that advantage is taken of
that
advantage -- by naturally extending their existing 'publish or perish'
mandate
to 'publish and self-archive'
(so as to
maximize the access to, and the usage and impact of, your articles):
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
And we already know from a recent survey that
just as
they currently comply with their 'publish or perish' mandate, most
researchers
report they will not
self-archive if it
is not mandated, but they will
self-archive -- and self-archive willingly -- if ever it is mandated by their
institutions or funders:
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/.
"the
number of articles published in "Gold"
journals (5%)... is often contrasted with the total number of articles
published
under "Green" titles (85% or more), without any mention...
that a majority of those are not actually... in
Open
Access repositories"
On the contrary, it is always stated very
explicitly (including in an
article co-appearing in the very
same issue as J-CG's article!)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/impact.html
that whereas 93% of journals are Green, only
20% of
articles are OA, 15% of them OA via self-archiving! This fact is not
being
concealed, it is being trumpeted, in
order to point out that if researchers really want and need OA and its
benefits
in terms of access and impact as much as they are described (by OA
advocates of
both the Green and Gold hue) as wanting and needing it, then it is up
to
researchers to provide it -- particularly where they have even been
given their
publisher's Green light to go ahead and do so!
But it is clear that just as far fewer
researchers would
publish anything at all (despite the advantages of publishing --
advantages
that researchers presumably want and need) if it were not for their
institutions' and research funders' "publish or perish" mandate to do
so, so
researchers will likewise not self-archive until their institutions and
research funders make their employment, salary and research funding
conditional
on their doing so. (Institutions and funders already do this
implicitly, in
making researchers' employment, salary and research funding conditional
not
only on publication, but on the impact
of publication. Since OA maximizes impact, this implicit causal
connection and
contingency now simply needs to be formalized explicitly.)
"Harnad...
estimates the ratio between the
"Green" archived articles and the "Gold" articles to be
roughly three to one in favor of the former... -- a result that, if real,
is far
from insignificant, but quite different from the [85/5] ratio"
This apparent inconsistency is very easily
resolved: The
Green/Gold ratio for actual
OA is 3/1.
The Green/Gold ratio for potential
(immediate) OA is 95/5.
"a
more fundamental problem...: Why are repositories not
growing at the rapid pace one could hope for?"
The answer is exactly the same as if the
question had
been "Why are publications
not growing
at the rapid pace one could hope for?" -- asked before the era of
"publish or
perish": Because it needs to be mandated, for researchers' own good
(and for
the good of research itself).
But, to put this in context, there is no
special question
for OA self-archiving: Although 5% of journals are OA, many of them are
still
short on submissions. (Some BioMed
Central journals publish only 5 articles per
year.) So it is true of both Green and Gold
that researchers are not yet taking full advantage of their potential.
A
critical difference, however, is that one can mandate OA self-archiving but one cannot mandate OA publishing -- for that would
be to
abrogate the author's right to choose which journal is most suitable
for his
paper (and that would most definitely meet with stout resistance from
researchers!). Nor can one mandate that non-OA publishers become OA
publishers.
Researchers' institutions and funders can only mandate OA
self-archiving -- or,
as I have proposed, more ecumenically: they can mandate OA provision, where OA can be provided either by publishing in an OA journal if a
suitable one
exists (Gold) or
otherwise by
publishing in a suitable non-OA journal and self-archiving the article
(Green).
"Institutional
archives are being created, but need to be
filled more quickly, by authors, with research journal papers.
Attracting
authors and their papers requires evidence of services that will
improve the
visibility and impact of their works"
Correct, and we are gathering and disseminating
the
requisite evidence:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
However, as noted, this evidence, and the
probability of
enhanced usage and impact to which it attests, is still not enough to
induce
a high or fast enough rate of OA-provision, just as the probability of
the
usage and impact that will result from publishing at all is not enough
to
induce publishing: The incentive to provide OA, like the incentive to
publish,
must be made explicit, as being among the formal conditions for
employment,
promotion and research funding, much the way both publishing and
research
impact are already among the conditions for employment, promotion and
research
funding.
"Is
it just a question of advocacy, or are there other
factors... that make most scientists neglect the impact advantages
linked with 'self-archiving'?"
It is a question of information and advocacy,
but also of
the need for measures to overcome researcher inertia.
"a
crucial distinction... must be drawn between Open Access
and accessibility"
This distinction -- which sounds here like a
distinction
between accessibility and accessibility -- will turn out to be a
distinction
between accessibility and ease-of-access.
Accessibility is a necessary precondition for ease-of-access, and inaccessibility
is what OA is concerned to remedy; no amount of increase in the ease-of-access to
the accessible will remedy the inaccessibility of the inaccessible.
"a
research scientist enjoys what amounts to "Open
Access" to everything [for which his institution purchases a
site-license]"
I don't think it is at all useful or
instructive to speak
of licensed institutional online access as "Open Access." OA means
online
access free for all and not only for those whose institutions have paid
for the
access. No institution can afford licensed online access to all 24,000
journals; hence OA is always for the sake of what is not accessible to any given institution because it
cannot
afford paid access to it. It does not help, in this regard, to speak of what is accessible to an institution online via
licensed access as
being OA.
That simply muddies the waters.
"How
significant a fraction... of the scientific literature
[can an institution afford to license]? This varies with each library
and its
financial resources, but Open Access it is..."
Licensed access is certainly not Open Access:
Regardless
of how significant a fraction of the journal literature any given
institution
can afford to license, OA is defined precisely in contrast to licensed
access:
OA is what is needed for that equally significant fraction of the
journal
literature that any institution cannot
afford.
"As
a result, and from the users' perspective, genuinely
"Open Access articles" actually compete with other documents that,
although very costly, appear nevertheless to be in Open Access as well"
I cannot follow this at all. Where is the
competition? If
a given article is accessible to a user via licensed access and is also
accessible free via OA (a self-archived version), what is competing with
with what, for what?
The article benefits from all the usage it gets, in both versions. What
is the
problem here? (I think J-CG is implicitly thinking of OA journals
competing
with non-OA journals here, whereas what we are speaking of is self-archived
versions of non-OA journal articles, and the notion of "competition"
simply
makes no sense in that case.)
"In
effect, the end user, the scientist-as-reader, is
being subsidized and thus benefits from a situation of artificial (and
partial)
Open Access"
I don't understand why this is being put in
this tortured
way: The article is accessible to some of its potential users for a fee
(the
institutional license toll), and to the rest of its potential users for
free
(OA); that's all there is to it. From the user's standpoint, I can
access some
articles for (institutional) fee (toll), others (sometimes the same
article)
for free (OA).
What is the fuss about here? What is clarified
by
referring to ordinary toll-access (whether institutional subscription,
site-license, or pay-per-view) as "subsidized" access, and by referring
to
institutional toll-access as "artificial" or "partial" OA? That
licensed access
is being "subsidized" by institutional tolls; and what OA is about is
precisely
what the institution cannot afford to subsidize through
institutional tolls.
"Obviously,
this greatly distorts the market conditions
and it artificially allows toll-gated articles better to compete with
Open
Access articles"
None of this makes any sense! What has the
market to do
with this? And what is competing with what? Articles compete with each
other
for usage and impact, and the articles that can only be accessed via
tolls lose
to the articles that can also be accessed toll-free (i.e., are OA). The
OA
advantage is between articles, not between non-OA and OA versions of
the same
article. The comparison is always non-OA versus OA within the same
journal and
year, where OA includes the impact of both the non-OA version and the
OA
(self-archived) version of each OA article.
If one treats this straightforward
access/impact metric
as a pseudo-economic variable, the picture is simply confused, not
clarified.
(I suspect that here too J-CG is implicitly thinking about the
competition
between OA (Gold) and non-OA journals, not noticing that this does not
make
sense for the Green case of either (1) competition between OA and
non-OA
articles in the same non-OA journal, or (2) "competition" between the
OA
(self-archived) and non-OA versions of the same article!)
"Without
governmental intrusion (in the form of support
for libraries which produce the conditions for subsidized readers), the
whole
business plan of most scientific publishers would simply collapse. In
the
present, distorted, market conditions, the competition between Open
Access
articles and toll-gated articles simply cannot be played out on the
plane of
price comparison; if it is to be played out at all, it will be on the
plane of
accessibility and value"
I have no idea why all this economic theorizing
is
obtruded into what -- without it -- was a rather simple,
straightforward
phenomenon: Toll access alone allows less access, usage and impact than
free
online access (OA). That's all there is to it; the rest is just gratuitous hermeneutics.
"Accessibility...
is more complex than a mere opposition
between open and toll-gated access... [I]t can involve the ease... with
which a
reader both retrieves information and navigates in it...
[A]ccessibility may
actually decrease while access remains constant... Delays in access
drastically
reduce use even though access per se is not modified"
Agreed that delays reduce access, but
irrelevant to the
issue at hand, which (I take it) is non-OA vs. OA.
Compare: "accessibility can decrease while
access remains
constant" with (my gloss): "ease-of-access
may decrease while accessibility
[i.e., possibility-of-access] remains constant."
Articles are more accessible, and have higher
usage and
impact, if there is a free online version of them, in addition to the
toll-access version. That is all there is to it, and that is all
that is
meant by accessibility: Toll
access
versions are accessible only to those users whose institutions can pay
the
tolls. OA versions are accessible to everyone.
"Bundling" concerns ease-of-access, not accessibility; and if/when there is enough OA content (and not the mere 20% there is now), then that can be bundled too. And Firefox can make a back-end that -- like http://paracite.eprints.org/ but automatically and silently -- performs an OA version of any search being done on a bundled toll-access database, as well as seeking an OA version of any hits yielded by the toll-access search.
J-CG is simply underestimating the power of
this medium
on account of its not yet having been more fully mobilized (simply
because the
OA content has so far been too thin to warrant or reward the effort).
The
priority now is obviously to increase the OA content (the prospect that
J-CG is
here both minimizing and misunderstanding), and then the functionality
will
quite naturally follow.
"what
is more accessible? A large [licensed] collection
of articles... or scattered collections of open access articles...
perhaps drowned
in collections of very uneven value... OAIster, for example?"
This question is too vague: What percentage
of the
literature are we imagining to be
OA, in
comparing OAIster to a licensed collection? Harvesting and indexing can
and
will be improved once there is more OA content. (Right now it would be
ridiculous to invest in improving OAIster as a precondition for
providing more
OA content! In principle, OAIster can be made exactly as convenient and
functional as a licensed collection -- with the added benefit that it
can cover
100% of the 24,000 journals (and not just the fraction for which we can
afford
licensed access) and that it is accessible to everyone (not just those
who can
afford license fees).
But it does not stop there: Once OAIster has
enough OA
content to make it worthwhile, OAIster search can easily be integrated
with
searches of licensed content, via software (as described earlier).
So these are all just spurious and arbitrary
comparisons,
and they neither contradict nor cast further light on the simple fact
that
articles that are accessible only via toll-access are for that reason
less
accessible, and hence have less impact, than articles for which
toll-access is
supplemented by a self-archived OA version.
"Clifford
Lynch writes:...'publications that are not
instantly available in full-text will become kind of second-rate...
because
people will prefer the accessibility'"
It is not clear whether Clifford Lynch is
speaking here
about instant online licensed access (to those who can afford it), or
Open
Access. Either way, this has nothing to do with the fact that OA
maximizes
access and impact.
"Andrew
Odlyzko [writes]... "Amazon... is... more user-friendly
than any library system... based on a feel for accessibility rather
than a
concern for access." Both Odlyzko and Lynch are talking about
accessibility,
not Open Access per se"
What is this distinction between access and
accessibility? If I can access it online, it is more accessible than if
I
cannot access it online, whether I access it by non-OA or OA. But if it
can be
accessed by OA it is more accessible, to more users, than if it can
only be
accessed by non-OA.
(Amazon only lets you access the metadata and a
few pages
of the book anyway, so what is the point here? We are concerned with
full-text
online access to journal articles. And what does this have to do with
the
user-friendliness of Amazon vs. the user-friendliness of library-based
systems?
or their respective scope of coverage? This is all very hirsute, and
one senses
that it must be driven by a theory, for otherwise it is just needlessly
complicating and obscuring very simple phenomena.)
"Open
Access derives its real value from its ability to
improve accessibility"
The accessibility/access distinction is so far
completely
without content. The only distinction that makes sense is limited
access
(non-OA; i.e., <100%) versus unlimited access (OA: 100%). At the
single
article level, this means accessible-to-some (non-OA) versus
accessible-to-all
(OA). There is no more to be said here; the points about ease-of-access
and
design of search engines or interfaces are irrelevant.
"[O]ther
approaches can also improve accessibility. Yet,
if all other things are equal, Open Access will come ahead of
toll-gated
publishing"
But we knew all this already, before this
needless detour
through the accessibility/access non-distinction!
"toll-gated
access is artificially subsidized... presently"
Why are we talking about toll-access
(institutional
subscriptions, site licenses, pay-per-view) as being "artificially
subsidized"?
The tolls are being paid by institutions. That's all there is to it.
And OA is
needed for all the users at institutions that cannot afford the toll-access.
"if
commercial publishers design good retrieval and
navigational tools... Open Access documents... look less attractive..."
Toll-based access will continue to look
attractive to
those who can afford it. But no matter how attractive or easy-to-use
its
retrieval and navigational tools, they are useless to those who
cannot
afford it. And that is what OA is for.
"Open
Access has to contend with more than toll-gated
articles; it must also compete with various enhancements to
accessibility"
OA is not competing! (OA journals may be competing with non-OA journals,
but we are
speaking here about OA, not OA journals. J-CG appears to be so
committed to an
economic/sociological theory that he cannot think of OA as anything but
OA
publishing...)
OA is competing with neither non-OA nor with
enhanced
non-OA accessibility tools.
OA is not competing.
It is complementing:
It is
providing access for those who can afford neither the non-OA tolls, nor
(a-fortiori) their accompanying enhanced ease-of-access tools.
"The
very librarians who [are] pro-Open Access... work...
hard to ensure that toll-gated articles...enjoy an even playing field
with Open
Access articles by artificially removing all economic barriers to the
[user, through licensing]"
This becomes more
and more
baroque: Librarians who are pro-OA are presumably helping to promote
Gold or
Green OA or both. They are also continuing to pay for whatever non-OA
they can
afford. That is clear and quite natural. But what is this about an
"even
playing field" for non-OA and OA articles?
What are they playing at or competing about or for? Non-OA articles get
only
the would-be users whose institutions can afford access; OA articles
get all would-be
users, and vice-versa. OA journal articles may be competing with non-OA journal articles; but we were speaking here about
OA, were
we not, rather than collapsing everything again into just OA publishing?
Yes, librarians
have to keep
on buying in non-OA journals, even if they would love to see all
journals
become OA journals, because only 5% of journals are OA journals, and
95% are
not. That is not irony; that is reality. And the remedy is to try to
think of
another way to reach 100% OA than to wait for 95% of journals to
convert to Gold!
"No
wonder if the library profession sometimes appears
caught in a prisoner's dilemma"
The library profession is not caught in a
prisoner's
dilemma. They are trying to buy in the access they can afford, and 95%
of
journals are non-OA, so those journals (or rather the fraction of them
that any
given library can afford) need to continue to be bought in. And
librarians are
not themselves in a position to provide OA by any means: They are not the authors, nor are
they the publishers; nor do
they have a lot of spare cash to cover OA journal publishing costs. So
they are
not in a prisoner's dilemma; they are merely trying to keep on making
ends meet
from year to year. If they have any time to spare, that time is best
spent
trying to promote institutional self-archiving, for if that practice
spreads,
librarians will not only have helped in facilitating the provision of
their own
institutional OA output, but they and their users will become the
beneficiaries
of other institutions' OA output. Time much better spent than just
trying to
promote OA journals.
http://software.eprints.org/handbook/libraries.php
"commercial
publishers ... [through CrossRef, Ex Libris
SFX, etc.]... enhance accessibility [while] the user remains... blind
to the costs"
This is all completely irrelevant: It applies
only to the
non-OA literature that an institution can
afford to buy in, whereas OA is about the literature it cannot afford to buy in.
"any
significant advance [in] accessibility... on the Open
Access side will quickly be taken up by the toll-gated side as well...
The
reverse... is not true. Tools... stitching together...disconnected archives may be proprietary"
It is again completely irrelevant that OA
resources (both
articles and search tools) are accessible to all, whereas non-OA
resources
(both articles and search tools) are accessible only to those who can
afford
them. The only relevant thing is that OA complements non-OA for all who cannot afford the
non-OA. J-CG
here seems to be spiraling higher and higher in theory-driven epicycles
that
have nothing whatsoever to do with OA or what OA is needed for (which
is not to
reform journals or remedy affordability problems but to provide access
to all
who cannot afford it, so as to maximize impact).
[I suspect that what J-CG once again has in
mind here in
referring to the two "sides" is the competition between OA journals
and
non-OA journals, not between OA
versions of
articles (self-archived from non-OA journals) and non-OA versions of
those same
articles, or with non-OA articles that have no OA version (because they
have
not been self-archived). There is simply no relevant competition to
speak of in
the case of articles!]
Rival toll-based OAIsters locking up OA
content? They're
welcome to try, but I'd bet on the ingenuity of the free OAI-service
providers
beating that of the toll-based ones every time... (But we are counting
our
chickens -- toll-based and free services -- before the OA eggs are
laid!)
"the
Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting... (OAI-PMH)...is equally applicable to open and
closed
collections [and hence concerns] accessibility... not... Open Access
per se"
Not quite: OAI-PMH does not deal with
"accessibility"
issues, it deals with interoperability (including ease-of-access)
issues, and
interoperability (of metadata) is completely indifferent as to the
accessibility
of the full-texts --
i.e., as to whether the full-texts are OA or
non-OA.
(Amongst the possibilities for OAI metadata, there is of course also that of
tagging the rights associated with a digital object:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html
http://www.openarchives.org/documents/OAIRightsWhitePaper.html
That is -- like the Creative Commons License itself
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html
-- welcome, but not
necessary, in the special case of OA self-archived versions of published
journal articles, which continue to be protected by the publisher's
copyright agreement.)
"[Free]
accessibility tools such as ParaCite... [are] still
experimental... Commercial offerings [are] more developed"
Correct. But what OA needs now is more OA, not
more tools
for the limited OA there is to date. The enhanced tools will come with
the
territory, as the percentage OA increases. In contrast, there are
plenty of
incentives for perfecting tools on the non-OA literature, which is far
bigger
(indeed, by definition, complete, 100%).
"thanks
to... subsidized [licensed] reading... commercial
publishers can... [say] their literature, although toll-gated, is more
accessible... today than... Open Access [articles]... at least in the
richest
institutions..."
This argument can only be defended if we use
this rather
arbitrary ostensive definition of "accessibility," which seems roughly
equivalent to "ease of access". But, to repeat: No degree of ease of
access is
of any use to those users who cannot afford it! So enhanced non-OA
tools are simply
irrelevant to OA.
(It is also no doubt the case that in the online
age, more
articles are accessible to more users, via non-OA, than were ever accessible
previously. This too is true, but irrelevant, because OA is about the
remaining
articles that still cannot be accessed, and about the users that still
cannot
access them.)
"How
do scientists, research institutions, or granting
agencies react to the issue of accessibility?"
How they react to the issue of ease-of-paid-access or to
the issue of access,
simpliciter?
How they react as users (of what their
institutions can
and cannot afford to access)?
Or how they react as authors (of what would-be
users at
other institutions can and cannot afford to access)?
"[Everyone]
obviously want to maximize impact, but... a
granting agency... [also] likes to demonstrate... public service...
[not just for]
research scientists... [but for] readers... from wider walks of life"
It is equally true of all potential users -- whether researcher or
general public -- who cannot
afford the non-OA versions, that what is not OA they cannot access. So
what is
the point here? The research funder wants to maximize usage and impact,
and OA
will ensure that. And self-archiving can provide immediate 100% OA.
("Impact," by the way, does not just refer to
citation
impact: There is now also measurable download-impact, and still richer
impact
indicators will emerge as the full-text OA corpus grows.)
http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php
"A
private foundation...too wants to enhance its social
function... A research center... or a university [too]"
(It is not apparent what the point is here.
This analysis
was meant to be about the relation of Green to Gold. Instead we are
being
reminded here of why we need OA at all, and that it is to maximize
access and
impact.)
"Scientific
associations often display ambivalence to
Open Access... for economic reasons"...
[T]he
Royal Society of Chemistry claims
that scientists often favor a limited number of "quality" readers and
laboratories over maximum dissemination...
However
surprisingly the issue of accessibility is
recast, it recurs nonetheless"
Scientific associations are not (and cannot be)
against
OA itself. Many are against OA publishing
(Gold), because it puts their revenues at risk. Some (fewer and fewer)
are also
against self-archiving (Green), because they think that even that might
threaten their revenues (but the number of publishers who think this
way is
shrinking fast).
The Royal Society of Chemistry is now Green http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers/63.html
So the above demurral can only be about not
wanting to
convert to Gold, not about OA in general.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how and
why J-CG
construes non-OA publishers' disinclination to convert to Gold as
having to do
with "the issue of accessibility" -- particularly in J-CG's sense of
that word
("ease-of-access"), and particularly when the non-OA publisher is
already
Green!
"The
lack of enthusiasm for institutional repositories
displayed by scientists and scholars is an interesting symptom"
Researcher sluggishness in providing OA to
their
articles is in fact the only interesting symptom (of why 100%
immediate OA --
which has already been reachable for over a decade now -- has been so
slow in
coming); and it is also the only real obstacle to 100% OA. The symptom
is
probably closely related to whatever made it necessary to create
publish-or-perish carrots-and-sticks in order to get scientists and
scholars to
publish at all. But there are also at least 32 groundless Worries that
have
been holding back OA provision despite the fact that each Worry has been
easily
(and repeatedly, and decisively) rebutted: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32-worries
"The
justifications that scientists sometimes use to
express skepticism can be a little surprising, as when authors advance
the
spurious fear of 'information overload' argument"
That's Worry #4 of the 32 Worries (and it pertains to
OA, not
just to OA self-archiving)...
"But
"information overload" is not really the
issue: Open Access can accommodate filters, hierarchies, and branding
just as
well as toll-gated contexts"