Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access:
The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold

Stevan Harnad

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
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.005

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 eculation 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 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.

All highlighted quotes are from J-CG's article:

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 supporters of self-archiving 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?

In this paper, it is argued that each route actually corresponds to a phase in the movement toward Open Access; that the mere fact of self-archiving is not enough; that providing some branding ability to the repositories is needed.

The mere fact of 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.)

However, doing so will eventually bring about the creation of overlay (or database) journals. The two roads, therefore, will merge to create a mature OA landscape.

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.

And what is certain is that 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 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.

researcher's work.

The concern, first expressed by librarians, was that the high prices of journals obviously limited access by economic means. Gradually, the question has evolved, and issues of access have 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 lately now beginning to be unmixed, at last.)

In parallel, Open Access has been increasingly focusing on articles, beside journals. A number of reasons have contributed to this gradual shift: 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 recognise 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.)

What has this to do with the proposition that 'digital publishing maintains the journal titles mainly for branding reasons'? This sounds like another speculation about the hypothetical day when journals may become merely 'overlays' of some kind.

but the bundling strategies used by several major publishers tend to rest about equally on number of titles and number of articles; the very dynamics of the "Open Access" movement, as we shall see, have also contributed to give greater prominence to the article as a unit.

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.

"Open Access" became a movement after a meeting was convened in Budapest in December 2001 by the Information Program of the Open Society Institute. That meeting witnessed a vigorous debate about definitions, tactics, and strategies,1 and out of this discussion emerged two approaches which have become familiar to all observers, friends, or foes. First, existing journals find a way to transform themselves into Open Access publications, or new Open Access journals are created. Second, authors and/or institutions "self-archive" published peer review articles or a combination that then becomes the equivalent of published, peer-reviewed articles.

(There is a minor historical error here: OA publication (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.)

The first strategy amounts to a reform of the existing publication system. It fundamentally relies on journals as its basic unit, and it simply aims at converting or creating the largest possible number of Open Access journals.

Both OA self-archiving and OA journal publishing (and indeed, OA itself, and the definition of OA) 'fundamentally rel[y] 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.

BioMed Central, a commercial operation, has played a crucial pioneer role in this context. More recently, it has been joined by the nonprofit Public Library of Science (PloS). This strategy obviously threatens the "reader-pays" business plan2 and therefore immediately faces the issue of financial viability, with the result that spirited debates have been generated, largely centered on the viability of the "author pays"3 model used by BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.

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.

In other parts of the world, a number of research councils or academies supported by governmental, public, funds have also begun transforming their journals into Open Access publications.4 In such cases, the issue of financial viability simply rests on the will of governments to support scientific publishing-a point that varies very much with each country and circumstances.

All these 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%); (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.

While in the United States, such governmental intervention may sometimes seem problematic, especially from the perspective of the publishing business, in other parts of the world, this is accepted and practiced as a matter of course. However, what is at stake in all countries is how to integrate the publication costs within the research costs, given that the latter are largely supported by public money (including the United States, this time).

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 - hence its rhetorical seduction - 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.

Generally speaking, [self-archiving] rests on the preeminence of the article as fundamental unit. From this perspective, 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. Therefore, journals contribute to the impact of individual articles by their prestige - a dimension generally associated with the notion of "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.

As becomes obvious from these remarks, journals are useful mainly to the researcher-as-author; the author-as-reader, on the other hand, cares mainly about articles and pays attention to journals only to the extent that they may help guide his/her 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.5

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 not in fact 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!)

Finally, and seen from the perspective of "self-archiving," 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.

Speculation just invites counter-speculation, and one can counter-speculate as well as the speculators can speculate, if one must: 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.)

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

In summary, "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.

"Green" and "Gold" Open Access: Are They in Competition?

Various Internet lists (e.g., Liblicense-L discussion list or American Scientist Open Access Forum) have been the site of vigorous discussions about the two strategies identified in the original Budapest meeting and now regularly labeled as the "Green" and the "Gold" roads to Open Access. This colorful vocabulary emerged in a study led in the United Kingdom under the name of Rights Metadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO) and now located within another project called Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA).6 Essentially, "Gold" refers to Open Access journals; Green refers to publishers that allow some form of article "self-archiving."

Sometimes shades of Green have been carefully distinguished: Pale Green limits "self-archiving" to preprints only, dotted, or some form of mitigated; Green limits "self-archiving" to postprints; and solid Green is reserved for publishers allowing both preprint and postprint "self-archiving." Publishers that allow no form of "self-archiving" are often described as Gray publishers (personally, I would have expected red but perhaps I am too influenced by traffic lights to the point of confusing "Gold" with orange).

Whatever the perspective adopted, the "Gold" and "Green" strategies are generally treated as parallel approaches by both sides, and 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 that we have instead spent mostly speculating!

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm

When perchance their relationship is addressed, it is tangentially and mainly in the suggestion that they might be in some form of competition. This has been particularly true of the "Green" side.

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! 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, explicitly or implicitly, is not useful; worse, it is 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.

Far from being essentially separate and in a potential state of competition for resources, I shall argue in this paper that the "Gold" and "Green" approaches can actually support each other, and ought to. 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. Only in this way can Open Access become a reality within a not too distant future. This is the challenge for this paper.

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.

Two very recent events help understand this issue and they have also provided an interesting backdrop to this whole question. For one, the appearance of "Scientific Publications Free for All," the Science and Technology Committee of the UK House of Commons7 immediately gave rise to a number of important comments and reactions. Less openly, but quite significantly nonetheless, the House Appropriation Committee in the United States, in its recommendations for the 2005 National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget, included language about the need for Open Access. That very language is reverberating within supporters as well as within publisher associations even as I write these lines.8 Together, they give fascinating insights into the ways in which Open Access is actually progressing.

The "Green" side has claimed to be particularly pleased with the UK Commons Select Committee Report, and it has certainly taken advantage of its publication to clamor its preference for "self-archiving."

Its summary of the UK Commons Select Committee has been presented in a way that Stevan Harnad, its most representative spokesperson, calls an "order of concreteness." This "order" really corresponds to the hierarchic scale of objectives favored by the "self-archiving" side. He summarizes the report's 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

This reaction to the British Report also praises the members of the Select Committee for "getting it," as many would say colloquially. "Getting it" in this case really means that, according to the "Green" side, the Select Committee put the accent exactly where it should, namely, at the first point cited above; it also claims that the report has placed other possible characteristics of Open Access in a hierarchically inferior position. For the "self-archiving" side ˆ la Harnad, point one is all that Open Access really needs-a thesis he has constantly supported for about a decade now. He particularly praises the fact that this report's specific recommendation to Parliament is the only "mandatory" recommendation (hopefully this is not an oxymoron) while points two and three are presented as recommending recommendations (hopefully this is not a tautology). In short, the Report vindicates his own position, or so he claims.

So far, despite the needless irony, 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!)

Why is the "mandating" part so crucial? To answer this, a fairly long detour is needed. Let us begin by a precise outline of the "Green" argument:

1. Librarians initially blew the whistle on the fact that something was amiss in scientific communication when they began observing steep increases in the prices of journals.

The following summary is largely correct. I note here only that whereas librarians blew the whistle, researchers were already doing something about it, as of the advent of the Internet: they were already self-archiving.

2. They should be thanked for that, but alas, this particular angle of analysis also favored a certain degree of confusion between access and affordability.

3. While affordability has been the traditional, library-based, route to access, access can be analytically distinguished from affordability.10

4. In other words, access can be treated entirely separately from science publishing and its economic characteristics. This is the road that researchers (as distinguished from librarians) ought to follow.

5. If researchers carefully train their sights on the issue of access and nothing else, they can issue themselves the following challenges: How can one provide free access to refereed articles that are locked up behind a price barrier in the published, refereed, journals and that are owned by the publishers of these journals? How can this goal be achieved without relying on having them bought up by a proxy organization such as a library?

6. The solution to this problem begins with technology: Without digital versions of the articles and the Internet, the problem would have no practical solution. However, technology is only a necessary condition for the existence of a solution. Beyond the technology, human agency is also needed: Authors (mainly) are asked to "self-archive" their articles.

7. The point for authors is not to engage in some sort of civil disobedience, for example, by breaching intellectual property laws. Instead, one must either obtain permission to "self-archive" or find loopholes in intellectual property laws (and possibly journal policies). If explicit permission to "self-archive" is not available, one can still "self-archive" the article as submitted first to the publishing journal and then in a separate file "self-archive" the corrigenda that transform the submitted version into the actually published version.

8. More recently, a number of publishers have simply decided to allow authors to "self-archive" either preprints or postprints or both. The willing or "Green" publishers (all shades of Green conflated) control around 85% of the (surveyed11) scientific titles published in the world.12 The somewhat complicated maneuvers associated with point seven above are mentioned as little as possible. They remain necessary, however, for the Pale "Green" publishers who accept only the archiving of preprints.13

So far, so good! However, the issue becomes more contentious when the "self-archiving" side extends the argument to include the "Gold" road. It does so as follows:

9. The other possible approach to Open Access is through the publishing of Open Access journals (the "Gold" road).

10. A survey of the present situation reveals that Open Access journals cover around 5% of the titles (or number of articles) at best. It also shows a slower growth than the number of articles accessible in open repositories.

11. The reason for this is that the "Gold" road is costly, risky, and inefficient.14

12. Consequently, anyone genuinely interested in Open Access should recognize that supporting the "Gold" road is a somewhat ineffective effort at best.15 At worst, it delays success by diverting resources to an inferior strategy,16 thus intimating that the two roads, in actuality, compete for rare resources and that money should be diverted to the "Gold" road only in proportion to its (very limited) usefulness.

J-CG's summary 1-12 above 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).

Although this argument appears watertight, it is pragmatically flawed. 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 reason is relatively simple to identify: The "self-archiving" side describes its own strategy as a smooth, yet anarchic, way to Open Access. Beyond the fact that smoothness and anarchy do not couple easily, we are going to see that 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, understandably, 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). 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/.

Before examining in more details why this is the case, let us revisit the issue of the relative importance of the two roads. This is important because, it seems to me, the situation is often portrayed in somewhat disingenuous terms. For example, the number of articles published in "Gold" journals (5%) - and these are actual numbers of Open Access articles - is often contrasted with the total number of articles published under "Green" titles (85% or more), without any mention of the fact that a majority of those are not actually and presently available 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.)

The reality is more modest. Harnad himself is more careful and generally speaks in terms of percentage of articles available to self-archiving; however, the direct quantitative comparison between "Gold" and "Green" is often implied, intimated, suggested, connoted, or whatever, in many of the discussions on Open Access. Harnad himself, when he faces this issue squarely, estimates the ratio between the "Green" archived articles and the "Gold" articles to be roughly three to one in favor of the former17-a result that, if real, is far from insignificant, but quite different from the 5:85% 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.

This said, a more fundamental problem remains: Why are repositories not growing at the rapid pace one could hope for.18 This is the topic of the next section.

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 (OAA) publishing in a suitable non-OA journal and self-archiving the article (Green).

Open Access vs. Accessibility: A Potential Source of Confusion

Intuitively, the advantages of Open Access appear obvious: Better access should enhance more reading, and more reading should enhance more citations so that any right-thinking scientist ought to respond positively to such strong incitations. Spontaneously, he should rush and "self-archive." No mandating should even be needed. The reality, however, is a little different. Even defenders of "self-archiving" have had to admit this:

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.19

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 they attest, are 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 are 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.

By "evidence of services," the authors of this declaration presumably mean that the increased visibility and impact brought about by Open Access need to be made ... well ... more visible. Is it just a question of advocacy, or are there other factors come into play 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.

Let us begin with the question of impact. Impact, let us remember, is generally measured by the total number of times a given article is cited from the moment of its publication.20 Discipline-based studies have now confirmed what common sense suggests. Open Access does create more opportunities for more downloads and more "reads"; these parameters, in turn, correlate positively with more citations. The first notable study in this regard was Steve Lawrence's article, which appeared in 2001 and which, thanks to the number of times it has been quoted, has itself enjoyed quite an impact.21 Lawrence concludes his study in the following manner:

Free online availability facilitates access in multiple ways ... To maximize impact, minimize redundancy, and speed scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.

Note in passing that Lawrence quietly moves from "free online availability" to "research easy to access." The two are not quite equivalent. The difference, as I am going to argue, amounts to a crucial distinction that 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.

Since the appearance of Lawrence's article, several other studies dealing with astrophysics, mathematics, or computer science have also underscored the impact advantage of articles placed in Open Access repositories.22 What emerges from these subject-based studies is that, all things being equal, Open Access articles do present a significant impact advantage over toll-gated articles. Impact coefficients of two to five have been mentioned, which is indeed impressive.

These results, I believe, should be broadly accepted and I strongly suspect that more studies will continue to bolster this important claim. However, we must also remember the "all things being equal" clause and once again carefully distinguish access from accessibility. The task now is to define "accessibility" as precisely as possible.

We generally oppose toll-gated access, i.e., access conditional upon sufficient financial resources, to Open Access situations; however, in practice a research scientist enjoys what amounts to "Open Access" to everything in his/her library

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. 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.

- hopefully this [licensed access] is a significant fraction of the scientific literature. That is, after all, why libraries exist in the first place. How significant a fraction? This varies with each library and its financial resources, but Open Access it is, and thanks to the library.

OA is accordingly 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 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, but 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 rather tortuous 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 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!)

- an ironic point that was obviously misunderstood by the drafters of the recent open letter to Dr. E. Zerhouni when they complained about undue governmental intrusion in the private sector.23 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

Let us start with accessibility. It is more complex than a mere opposition between open and toll-gated access. For example, it can involve the ease, including psychological ease, with which a reader both retrieves information and navigates in it. If Reed-Elsevier prefers flat rate, bundling approaches to pay-per-view tactics, it is to enhance the accessibility of its products, not their access. If price is an issue, a concern, each time an article is accessed, use is inherently deterred because the reader is inhibited by constantly thinking about costs. As a result, accessibility may actually decrease while access remains constant.

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."

'ease-of-access may decrease while accessibility [i.e., possibility-of-access] remains constant.'

Articles, whether published by Elsevier or anyone else, 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 (s