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 (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.
From
another perspective, a significant part of Andrew
Odlyzko's paper (cited in note22) actually deals more with the ways in
which
accessibility can be improved than with Open Access per se. These ways
include
factors apparently as trivial as the amount of time needed to reach a
document-and differences measured in minutes have been shown to be
quite
significant. Delays
in access drastically reduce use even though access per se is not
modified.
Agreed, but irrelevant to the issue at hand,
which (I
take it) is non-OA vs OA.
Yet
another way to approach the question of accessibility
is to ask: what is more accessible? A large collection of articles
licensed by
a library (or a consortium of libraries) that is readily exploitable
through an
easy-to-use, easy-to-reach, portal, or scattered collections of open
access
articles, more or less systematically (but how systematically?)
harvested, and
perhaps drowned in collections of very uneven value. Is this not the
situation
that presently emerges with 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 something very important in this
regard:
'I
think we are very shortly going to cross a sort of
critical mass boundary where those publications that are not instantly
available in full-text will become kind of second-rate in a sense, not
because
their quality is low, but just because people will prefer the
accessibility.'24
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.
In
the same pragmatic spirit of ease of use, Andrew
Odlyzko reveals a trade secret that I have also given to my own
students (and I
thought I was so smart): if
you search information about recent books, use Amazon; it is far
better and much more user-friendly than any library system. This tactic
is
based on a feel for accessibility rather than a concern for access.25
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.)
The
point of all this is that accessibility is wider than
Open Access and encompasses it; 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.
However,
other 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!
However,
if toll-gated access is artificially subsidized
as it is 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.
and
if commercial publishers design good retrieval and
navigational tools, then Open Access documents may actually look less
attractive to scientists than their commercial counterparts.
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.
"All
other things being equal": there is the
rub! 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. Is J-CG so much in the grip of
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 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.
And
let us remember the bitter irony of the situation:
The very librarians who profess pro-Open Access positions are presently
working
very hard to ensure that toll-gated articles may enjoy an even playing
field
with Open Access articles by artificially removing all economic
barriers to the
reading scientist.
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 alone?
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 it!
No
wonder if the library profession sometimes appears
caught in a prisoner's dilemma, as Ken Frazier put it so aptly a while
back
while discussing some of the downsides of the "big deals."26
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
and some association publishers have been
quick to seize and capitalize upon new possibilities offered by the
digital
world, in particular the capacity to move seamlessly from a
bibliographic tool
to a full-text article or from a citation to the cited text. In short,
commercial publishers seem to have read Clifford Lynch closely and
taken his
advice very seriously. Ventures such as CrossRef, Ex Libris SFX, and
others27
aim at creating smooth navigational spaces that enhance accessibility;
meanwhile, the user remains largely and comfortably blind to the costs
of this
process thanks to those (oh so discrete!) librarians.
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.
On
the Open Access side, similar efforts are being
pursued to improve the accessibility of peer-reviewed research papers.
It must
be remembered, however, that any significant advance on the
accessibility front
on the Open Access side will quickly be taken up by the toll-gated side
as well
because, to be effective, such an advance must be openly available to
all. The
reverse, however, is not true. Tools useful for the stitching together
of
disconnected archives may be proprietary, putting Open Access endeavors
at an
economic disadvantage.28
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!)
A
case in point is the Open Archive Initiative-Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting... (OAI-PMH). OAI-PMH is absolutely
essential for
the Open Access depositories because they are evolving in a completely
decentralized fashion, but OAI-PMH is equally applicable to open and
closed
collections29 as Carl Lagoze sometimes explains in his conferences on
OAI-PMH.30 This is because OAI-PMH really deals with accessibility
issues, not
with 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 measure 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.)
Accessibility
tools such as ParaCite exist and they have
appeared on the Open Access side, but ParaCite is still experimental.
Therefore, commercial offerings to improve accessibility appear more
developed
than the tools available for Open Access repositories.
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%).
As
a result, thanks to the subsidized reading context of
scientific publications, commercial publishers can credibly defend the
argument
that their literature, although toll-gated, is more accessible to
researchers
today than are articles placed in Open Access, at least in the richest
institutions of the richest countries.
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)?
All
of them obviously want to maximize impact, but they
may not want to do it in exactly the same way or for the same reasons.
A
granting agency, especially if it is publicly financed, likes to
demonstrate a
degree of public service beyond the support of research scientists. For
such an
institution, impact will mean more than getting citations; it will also
mean
demonstrating that Open Access increases the number of readers and
attracts
individuals from wider walks of life (various levels of education well
below
the research level, for example, or patients in the case of medical
research).
As many of these different kinds of readers will not have the benefit
of a
research library, their access to the scientific literature is not
artificially
subsidized. This means that without Open Access, it is simply
inaccessible.
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 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 will not react very differently: it
too wants to enhance its social function (and public image). Much of
the
discussions around the granting agencies [Wellcome Trust, Hughes
Foundation,
Max Planck Gesellschaft in Germany, INSERM (The French Institute of
Health and
Medical Research) in France, and more recently, NIH) confirm this
favorable
attitude. A research center, especially if it is publicly supported, or
a
university will also listen to these kinds of arguments. All will tend
to view
Open Access in a positive light. Indeed, a simple examination of the
list of
signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative shows widespread
acceptance
of Open Access ideas within the universities and the research centers.31
(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. But are not
all agreed on
that point?)
Value
Scientific
associations often display ambivalence to Open
Access. Most of the time it is for economic reasons: Demonstrate to us,
they
say, that a good business plan exists for Open Access and we will
consider it.
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).
But
other, more surprising, objections are sometimes
raised as when the Royal Society of Chemistry claims that scientists
often
favor a limited number of "quality" readers and laboratories over
maximum dissemination.32
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.
However
surprisingly the issue of accessibility is
recast, it recurs nonetheless.
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!
Where
the issue appears more complicated is at the level
of the researchers. 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.
And that's the rebuttal to Worry #4: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#4.Navigation
BioMed
Central and the Public Library of Science (PloS)
offer good examples in this regard. In fact, the whole point of the
Public
Library of Science is to demonstrate that extremely high ratings can be
achieved with an Open Access journal, and Open Access journals
therefore can
help focus reading as well as toll-gated publications.33 Value in
scientific
publishing is measured by content, not by price. These
fears appear even more pronounced on the
"self-archiving" side, but in reality, they are just as imaginary:
The traditional value signals are still operational since
"self-archived" articles are peer reviewed and therefore can exhibit
a title with some branding ability.
Self-archived journal articles are not only
peer-reviewed:
they continue to bear the name of the non-OA journal that published
them! (The
'branding' issue will hence turn out to be a complete red herring for
self-archiving! Non-OA journals already have their names, i.e., their
'brands.
OA self-archiving hence does not have any branding problem. It is only
new
journal start-ups [whether OA or non-OA] that have an [initial]
branding
problem, while they are still new and trying to establish their quality
standards and impact factors.)
The
factors that inhibit the progress of Open Access
obviously lie elsewhere.
A
partial explanation to this puzzle may be found in a
remark recently expressed by Michael Kurtz. In a note devoted to the
positive
(and important) correlation between "reads" and number of citations,
he concludes by a little remark that has not attracted much attention
so far:
'The
fact that many of the inaccessible papers are in the
ArXiv probably does not change this much, as the additional effort
involved
[from leaving ADS's34 unified resource to go to another system] is a
great
deterrent.'
What
Kurtz is alluding to is that tools providing the
standard, accepted, research pathways and corresponding to the accepted
research tactics also provide a level of accessibility related habits
and these
are not changed easily or lightly.
Astrophysicists
essentially use one single source to do
their research.
It also needs to be pointed out that (as Kurtz
notes)
astrophysics is unique in that it has virtually 100% access already --
not
through Gold and not through Green either (although a great deal of
astrophysics is self-archived too) but because astrophysics has a
small, closed
circle of journals and all active astrophysicists worldwide are at
institutions
that can afford licensed access to all of them.
Sometimes
some of the articles found in this manner
cannot be accessed within the familiar research environment. Could
these
articles have been accessed nonetheless? In some cases, yes, states
Kurtz, and
simply by going to ArXiv; however, doing so would require changing the
search
context (and habits) of scientists and would force them to move beyond
their
favored research aid, in this case ADS. Kurtz' comments on this point
is quite
simple and direct: "the additional effort involved is a great
deterrent."35
In other words, even
when articles can be accessed, a significant difference in
accessibility is
sufficient to reduce usage.
My interpretation of this would be that in an
anomalous
field -- unrepresentative because all researchers have almost 100%
access to
everything they need already -- users will often not make the extra
effort of
consulting another accessible source even though that means something
might be
missed. This luxury (or laziness) does not translate to most other
fields,
which are far from 100% OA, and where the OA version is a mainstay
rather than
just a minor supplement with small marginal utility.
It must also be added, however, that even in
astrophysics, with its near-100% access, articles that are also
self-archived
in ArXiv still show an impact advantage:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/?submit=Show&SAstronomy%2B%2526%2BAstrophysics=on
So some astrophysicists still make the extra
effort after
all.
Librarians
know Michael Kurtz' point well: being formally
able to access a document is simply not enough; the availability of
attention
(and therefore time) must also be taken into consideration. In
particular, if,
through some familiar method, a scientist finds what appears to be
"enough" information and does so within a limited amount of time,
chances are that the search will stop there.
The evidence that this is not true in general,
especially
where access is nowhere near 100%, is the consistent and sizable OA
impact
advantage observed across all fields. At the very least, the higher
number of
downloads and citations for articles that have been self-archived over
those
that have not is evidence that users who cannot access the non-OA
versions do
make whatever added effort may be involved in order to access the OA
versions: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3977.html
The
point of all this is that a typical scientist seeking
information is a prime subject for what has been called the "attention
economy."36 In a world with enormous amounts of information, the
limiting
factor is not information itself; it is the processing capacity of the
brain
multiplied by the time that can be devoted to a particular task,
reading for
example. Typically, a scientist or scholar will begin interrogating
some
bibliographic tool, e.g., the Web of Science. In the ideal situation,
the
scientist would immediately access the search results by simply
clicking on the
references. Often, this is not possible simply because the local
library does
not have a subscription to the relevant journal. At that point, rather
than
trying systematically to gather the whole collection of relevant
articles, the
scientist reads what is most readily and rapidly available. After all,
the
information found in that
incomplete collection of articles may be enough. The rest is then
neglected
unless really glaring gaps subsist. The eyes of the beholder are
crucial here.
Again, the empirical fact that the usage and
impact of
self-archived articles is consistently higher than that of
non-self-archived
ones, across all fields, is evidence against this (although laziness
might
explain why the OA advantage is not higher still). And once there is
more OA,
the ease-of-access will no doubt be improved, increasing the OA
advantage still
further -- until 100% OA is reached, when the OA/non-OA advantage will
of course
vanish, although usage will remain uniformly higher for all articles,
and the
decision about what to cite will be based more equitably on merit
rather than
mere affordability (i.e., accessibility).
Andrew
Odlyzko does not say anything fundamentally
different when he concludes:
Also,
the
reactions to even slight barriers to usage suggest that even
high-quality scholarly papers are not irreplaceable. Readers are faced
with a
'river of knowledge' that allows them to select among a multitude of
sources,
and to find near substitutes when necessary.37
But Odlyzko is referring to online vs. on-paper here, not to non-OA (licensed
toll-access) vs. OA. And when he does refer to non-OA vs. OA, it is to neglecting
non-OA in favor of OA (even if incomplete), not the reverse.
Odlyzko's
remark suggests that a scientist or a scholar
will typically find enough useful information to justify writing what
he/she
wants to write rather than first researching a field very carefully in
order to
survey what he/she can usefully add to the field. This may well be one
of the
unexpected (and not entirely welcome) consequences of the "publish or
perish" institutional atmosphere. It may also derive from Bradford's
law
of scattering: Exhaustively
gathering the literature on any question would require almost infinite
time and
resources.38
We are far from the possibility of exhaustive
access and
search (except perhaps in astrophysics), so there is no point talking
about it
now. What we have now is something varying from about 30% - 70% paid
institutional access to the non-OA corpus (95%) depending on the budget
of the
institution, plus about 1% - 25% OA (depending on the field). So we are
talking
about sufficient search, not exhaustive
search. J-CG seems to be
interpreting
Odlyzko's remarks as implying that sufficient search means relying on
the
available non-OA corpus and neglecting what is available OA. But the
evidence
(from the OA usage/impact studies) contradicts this (nor is this what
Odlyzko
is arguing).
For
the sake of the argument, let us assume that the
information found in a first hunting expedition is not sufficient. At
this
stage of his/her work, the author will probably adopt one among the
following
tactics. The traditional approach (at least from the librarian's
standpoint)
would be to make use of interlibrary loans. Since this is a relatively
time-consuming operation, a scientist may decide to proceed more
directly.
If
there is an Open Access
repository in a relevant discipline, he or she may take a look at it.
But
please note two details: First, the scientist's second move is at best
a second
order recourse; furthermore, in most disciplines, such repositories
simply do
not exist and institutional repositories cannot substitute for them.
First, this is not how users search for OA
content -- repository by repository.
Second, there is no need for disciplinary
repositories,
any more than there is a need for disciplinary indexes: ISI's Web of
Knowledge,
for example, serves all disciplines. It is via subject and journal-name
tags
(and full-text indexing) that journal contents are partitioned in the
online
age, not by putting them in a different geographic locus.
Third, institutional OA archives, for each
institution's
own published article output, in all its disciplines, are the natural
'feeders'
of the OA full-texts whose metadata can then be harvested by the OAI
search and
indexing services like OAIster. http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Eprints_LP_paper.pdf
Fourth, for anyone lacking access, the OA
version is not a
second-order recourse, it is the only
recourse.
Fifth, the data on the enhanced usage and
impact of
self-archived vs. non-self-archived articles (in the same journals and
years)
are a-posteriori evidence that users actually do make use of that recourse, despite the
a-priori theorizing above that
would imply they may not.
Finally,
search engines for Open Access collections are
not widely known among researchers. And when they are known, they are
often
considered with some degree of skepticism.39
What we should perhaps be considering with a
degree of
skepticism are the pronouncements of librarians on what researchers are
doing
at their desktops! The objective data on OA usage and impact suggest
that the
OA search engines and 'collections' are not as unknown as all that! And
increasing OA content from its current 20% level just might make them
more widely
known -- and might inspire them to provide enhanced functionality, in
keeping
with that enhanced OA content.
In
general, and this is the fundamental obstacle, Open
Access articles are not yet sufficiently part of existing research
strategies.
Why should OA articles form a bigger part of
existing
research strategies when OA content is still so small: a pathetic 20%!
Instead
of interpreting this current low percentage of OA content as evidence
for OA's
dysfunctionality, we should work to increase its functionality --
increasing
the percentage of OA content: by providing
it (though self-archiving)!
And
the consequence is direct: If Open Access
repositories do not appear very visible and/or credible within a given
arsenal
of research strategies, why should a scientist spend time to
"self-archive" his/her works in what can only look like a dump -
OAI-PMH notwithstanding?
J-CG has both the priorities and the causality
exactly
reversed: Researchers should self-archive to maximize the impact of
their own
work; this will increase OA content and generate more OA services and
functionality.
[J-CG is making these backwards arguments as if
they were
arguments against Green OA, because (for theoretical reasons) he
prefers Gold
OA (in order to reform the publishing system, solve the affordability
problem,
etc.). But the logic of these arguments (such as it is) applies equally
against OA itself,
whether Green or Gold: "Since there is so little OA visible,
it will
not be used, so why bother with OA at all?" Again, this has all the
symptoms of
being in the thrall of a theory, and having to tie oneself into knots
in order
to support the theory. Isn't it simpler to say: OA is desirable and
beneficial,
so we should endeavor to increase OA from 20% to 100% by all means
available --
Gold and Green -- each in proportion to its immediate potential to
provide OA?]
Of
course, there is still the recourse to brute force and
this is what the use of Google is all about. I can imagine many
librarians'
eyes rolling at this point-how can one trust the results acquired
through
Google, goes the mantra-but not only is this approach common, it
actually works
rather well.40 What
does Google yield? It may lead to some Open Access site, such as a
personal
page or an institutional repository.
Google (or Google Scholar) can only yield the
OA that
authors have provided. That's
just one
more reason authors should self-archive (and their institutions and
funders
should adopt the carrot/stick policies that will induce them to do it)!
Google's
discussions with the DSpace network also
demonstrate that the owners of the famous search engine are aware of
the
possibilities. It may also lead to an e-mail address: from there,
requesting
the interesting article directly is easy. From personal experience, I
know this
approach works rather well; yet, it has little to do with Open Access
but has
much more to do with the extraordinary facilitation of
communication-accessibility all over again-the Internet provides. E-mail
is still the "killer
app" of the Internet and improves the accessibility of articles,
toll-gated or not.
(This sounds rather vieux-jeu: Is it
not more sensible to
self-archive, once and for all, rather than to answer countless email
eprint requests?)
As
already mentioned, there are steps I do not see being
taken very naturally by anyone at this stage of Open Access
development: going
to OAIster, for example.41 Why
are researchers not using OAIster as a matter of course? The reason
is quite simple. Although they would find a collection of texts - a
large
collection of some 3,420,891 records from 327 institutions - they would
also
discover that the value of these documents is difficult to ascertain.42
Here's a much simpler answer as to why
OAIster is not used more: because OAIster still
has so little OA (as opposed to
just OAI) content!
That means peer-reviewed journal articles. When you
'hit' one of those, you know it's OA, because it has the journal name.
'Journal-name' is a potential OAI metadata tag. So is 'peer-reviewed.'
And
OAIster could easily display it and make it searchable -- but there's
hardly any
point now, when
the real problem is the pathetically small amount of OA content so far!
(Why keep focusing on the suboptimal
searchability of next-to-nothing, instead of
on transforming that next-to-nothing into something worth designing
more optimal
search tools for? And why keep focusing on the users of the
little OA that there
is so far, instead of on the authors of the much more OA
that there still isn't?)
Even
though OAIster limits itself to academic
institutions, the value of what can be found in such repositories
remains
unclear. On this point, Harnad is completely right when he recommends
building
archives explicitly limited to peer-reviewed articles.43 My recommendation was that institutional OA
Archives
should focus on making their own peer-reviewed article output OA, now, by
self-archiving it in their own institutional OAI-compliant OA Archives.
As far
as searchability is concerned, it is metadata tags (like 'journal-name'
and
'peer-reviewed'), not archive locus or focus, that will sort things out
optimally. A
scientist's search is already complex and uncertain
enough as it is. There is no need to burden it further with the noise
from
other academic activities such as teaching, lab reports, and Gray
literature.
The case of preprints is
interesting here, however Green they may be, because they too fall in
the same
murky category and should be stored separately. Why "stored separately" rather than OAI-tagged
appropriately ("not
peer-reviewed" vs. "peer-reviewed" plus "journal-name")? I must say that the view that email is still
the "killer-app" does sound a bit
out of tune with both the possibilities and the optimalities of the
online medium!
And as we shall soon see, just as J-CG keeps being driven by his own
theorizing to
think in terms of a "competition" between OA and non-OA articles (when
this only
makes sense for OA journal articles vs. non-OA journal articles, but
makes no
sense for OA versions of non-OA journal articles), so he keeps being
driven by his
own theorizing to thinking in terms of a need to add "value and
branding" to
self-archived articles (when this only makes sense for the
self-archived versions
of unrefereed preprints [which are virtually all destined for
peer-reviewed
journals], but makes no sense at all for OA's primary target: the
self-archived
versions peer-reviewed articles, already
published in journals [whether OA or non-OA]).
One
of the basic difficulties of
"self-archiving" is that, given its necessarily distributed nature -
consequence of the anarchic nature of the process - it becomes very
difficult
to mandate the form in which self-archiving will actually take place.
For
institutional repositories, the urge to fill it rapidly may translate
in motley
collections of documents that will serve no one. Distributedness is a virtue, not a vice, on the
Web. It
is part of the intrinsic nature and power of the Internet itself. There
is no
need to mandate the 'form' of self-archiving beyond the stipulation
that it
needs to be done in an OAI-compliant institutional OA archive, and that it is peer-reviewed
journal
articles that must be
self-archived.
Self-archiving (like the Web itself) is anarchic globally, but an
institutional
policy can make it systematic locally, at the institutional level: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php
The
success of repositories will be much more probable
when scientists know better what to expect. Then scientists may decide
to spend
some of their valuable time hunting through these collections. In the
case of
institutional repositories, I do not remember ever seeing a study
discussing
their effect on impact. This lack of evidence creates a climate of
uncertainty
and may also account for the hesitations marked by scholars and
scientists. If
they are not intimately convinced that there is a clear and present
advantage
to "self-archiving," they will simply go by the constraints of an
"attention economy" and forfeit going that extra step. The evidence for the OA impact advantage is
there, clear
and present and empirical! As to the strategic advantages of local
institutional self-archiving
over central self-archiving, see:
Alma Swan, Paul Needham, Steve Probets,
Adrienne Muir,
Anne O'Brien, Charles Oppenheim, Rachel Hardy, Fytton Rowland and
Sheridan
Brown (2005). Developing a model for e-prints and open access
journal
content for UK higher and further education. Learned
Publishing, 18 (1),
25-40. http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Eprints_LP_paper.pdf And, again, the problem not the users of what (little) OA there is so far,
but the authors of the
(much) OA there isn't, yet! This
efficient use of time, sometime labeled as
"inertia," will be even more tempting in the case of a Pale green
publisher where the procedure to self-archive is so much more complex
as to
become totally unrealistic. Only 20% of articles are OA, even though 80% of
journals are Full-Green! Why is
J-CG focusing on the (putative) complexities of the
13% that are Pale-Green (or the 7% that are Gray)
rather than
on the 80% of journals for which the self-archiving procedure is
straightforward? We shall soon find out: For J-CG has a theory
about how to replace the
journal publishing system with an alternative system, and that theory
depends on
being able to build the alternative system on top of unrefereed
preprints, not
peer-reviewed, published postprints. Hence it is necessary to
construe Green as
being the self-archiving of preprints rather than postprints. The
fact that 80% of
journals have already given their Green light to postprint
self-archiving -- and
that BOAI-1 has always primarily targeted the published, peer-reviewed
versions of
journal articles, rather than just their preprints -- must accordingly
be
minimized (in the service of the theory).
Indeed,
let us ask some crucial questions in this regard: 1.
How many authors will go through the tedious exercise
of creating the corrigenda allowing moving from the submitted paper to
the
published paper? If people do not appear ready simply to
"self-archive" their postprints when they have a Green light to do so
from the publishers, they will be even less ready to "self-archive"
their preprints plus the corrigenda, especially if they harbor real or
imagined
fears about possible negative reactions from publishers and editors
(i.e.,
powerful colleagues).44
To repeat, the vast majority (80%) of journal articles can already be
self-archived without needing to give such complications a thought: so
why this
needless preoccupation with the more complicated 20% minority
(when all of self-archiving has still barely reached 15%!)? (Moreover, physicists have been uncomplicatedly
self-archiving successive
versions, adding corrections, for over a decade now: So self-archiving
preprints
plus corrigenda is eminently feasible. The preprint+corrigenda strategy
was in any
case formulated mostly as a reductio-ad-absurdum for Worry #10 of the 32
prima-facie
Worries to which non-self-archivers were attributing their
non-self-archiving!)
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#10.Copyright
It was 2.
How many readers will go through the tedium of making
sure they have the right statement to use and cite in their own work
when they
have to deal with a main file and a list of corrigenda? Does J-CG mean: Yow many would-be users who cannot
afford access
to the non-OA version at all will be scholarly about the OA version
that they
do access, in the minority of cases when it is only the corrected
preprint to
which they have access? Let's leave that to historians of scholarship
to
investigate and report to us when this is all over. In the meanwhile,
can we get
on with the far more urgent and important task of reaching 100% OA? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#2.Authentication http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#23.Version
Given
all the issues discussed here, in particular the
question of accessibility (as distinguished from access), The access/accessibility distinction is
incoherent. The
access/ease-of-access issue is irrelevant. it
becomes pretty obvious why "self-archiving"
in simple institutional repositories will not be enough to create a
really Open
Access science communication system, even with OAI-PMH present. What is obvious is that only 20% of articles
are OA, 15%
of them via self-archiving -- and that that is far from enough, and
still growing too
slowly. But that we knew already. What we have here are a few post-hoc
conjectures as to why this might be the case. I find most of the
conjectures
off the mark, and based on misunderstandings about web use and
functionality
(and perhaps also about scholarly/scientific practice and needs). Far more likely than these conjectures is the
direct
testimony of researchers themselves, who state that they will not
self-archive
till they are required by their institutions and research funders to do
so --
but then the vast majority say they will do so, and do so willingly. In
other
words, it is the same as with requiring them to publish (or perish):
Incentives
are needed; the prospect of one's findings being read, used and cited
is not
enough, unless accompanied by carrots and sticks! http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
No
wonder, therefore, that scientists are not rushing to
self-archive; no wonder either that the "self-archiving" side has
welcomed mandating "self-archive" so enthusiastically, even though it
has nothing to do with the impact advantage argument. If research
institutions,
for example, through their promotion and tenure procedures, and the
granting
agencies, through their evaluation procedures, favor documents in Open
Access
in some ways, then Open Access will indeed progress. But one must
understand
that it is argument totally independent from the impact advantage
argument.
Institutions and funders mandating OA for their
research
output has nothing to do with the 'impact advantage argument' (and
evidence)?
One might as well say that the existing weight that institutions and
funders place on journal impact
factors has nothing to do with impact either! The very reason
for OA itself, and the institutional and funder rationale for mandating that OA should be provided
(by
self-archiving) has everything to
do with impact. It is in order to maximize the visibility, usage and
impact of
their research output -- instead of continuing to limit it to only those
users whose
institutions can afford to pay for access -- that universities and
granting
agencies are now planning to mandate self-archiving: (Does J-CG imagine, instead, that they are
mandating OA
in order to reform the publishing system or to solve the journal
pricing/affordability problem?) The
two [OA impact advantage and the OA self-archiving
mandate] simply work in the same direction even though the presence of
the
latter argument (mandating) makes the limits of the former (impact
advantage)
more visible. It must be added that the mandating argument is a
political
argument, working therefore at exactly at the same level as the
political
arguments needed to convince various institutions to support Open
Access.
"Self-archiving," despite appearances, needs politics as much as the
"Gold" road. It
is at this point that the reader must remember an
important detail: For the "self-archiving" side, the goal is maximum
impact and little more. Open Access is really nothing more than one
instrument
among several others capable of moving closer to this aim. Present
toll-gated
journals with subsidized reading on the part of the libraries also
contribute
to improving impact and this is the reason why some "self-archiving"
advocates seem to live quite comfortably with the present publishing
system,
however unjust it may be for scientists who have not yet managed to
establish
themselves, for example, for economic reasons.45 It is unclear why a simple, straightforward
point is being put so convolutedly:
Publishing in a non-OA journal generates some usage and
impact, but does not maximize it, because some potential users cannot
afford
paid access. They are denied access and their potential impact is
therefore
lost. Free online access (OA), through self-archiving, ends all
access-denial
and impact-loss by adding the usage and impact of those further OA
users to the
usage and impact of the non-OA users, to yield a maximized total
impact. That's
all there is to it! And whatever does any of this have to do with injustice
to "scientists who have not yet managed to establish themselves...
for economic reasons"? We are not talking about OA journals
here, and
about how poor authors will find the money to pay OA-journal costs! We
are
talking about self-archiving -- doing the few extra keystrokes it takes to
put the
digital text of one's published journal article (whether published in an OA
journal or a non-OA journal) online, free for all.
. Every author, rich or poor, established or
unestablished,
can do that! Or is J-CG's point here about authors whose institution has
no OA
archive yet, or cannot afford one? There are now more and more OA
archives that
will let such authors self-archive in their archives, so this too is a
non-problem. The real problem is the OA archives that exist, but are
not being
filled fast enough -- not the authors who have no archive to
self-archive in! http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse
Harnad
explains in the following way: Even
if the growth of the open-access versions is
destined eventually to reduce the demand for the toll-access versions,
that is
a long way off, because self-archiving proceeds gradually and
anarchically, and
journals cannot be cancelled while only random parts of their contents
are
openly accessible.46 In
short, self-archiving, being anarchic in nature and
incomplete in essence, works as a sort of impact bonus for those
scientists
willing to do it. Self-archiving is anarchic in nature, but
certainly not
'incomplete in essence'! Just incomplete in practice, today. Which is why systematic
institutional and
funder self-archiving mandates are needed: to remedy that
incompleteness. That
still leaves OA growing anarchically, article by article, rather than
systematically, journal by journal. But that is fine, and a buffer
against
catastrophic cancellations.
And of course OA self-archiving promises an
'impact bonus
for those scientists willing to do it' (and for their institutions and
funders
too, as well as for research productivity and progress itself). And
even for
those scientists who are presently unwilling to do it, but report that
they
will do it (willingly!) if/when it is mandated! http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf The
anarchic nature of the process almost certainly
guarantees its incompleteness. I cannot follow this at all: Why/how does the
fact that
OA is growing anarchically, article by article, instead of
systematically,
journal by journal, guarantee that it will not reach 100%? Worse,
it becomes difficult to know where the
incompleteness will appear. It is not incompleteness that appears, but completeness! We know where the OA incompleteness (80%) is today: just about everywhere. And we know that self-archiving will
reduce it, and
100% self-archiving will reduce it to 0% incompleteness. One does not
know
today which articles are not OA
(though it's a safe guess that at least 80% are not), but one does know
that
self-archiving can make that shrink, and that 100% mandated
self-archiving will
make it shrink to 0. There is no way to cancel journals now, or in
the near
future, on that basis -- but OA is not about, or for, canceling
journals! It is
about maximizing access and impact. As
a result, for most researchers, Open Access
repositories will probably not figure prominently in their literature
search
strategy. On what evidence does J-CG base this rather
gloomy
prediction? Current author self-archiving rates? Current OA usage
rates? The
probability of self-archiving mandates? The probable efficacy of
self-archiving
mandates? Moreover,
in many disciplines, scientists cannot put too
much faith in the capacity of Open Access to enhance their impact.
Which disciplines are those? I can find no
difference in
the uniform OA advantage across disciplines, just some variability in
its size
and in the extent and speed of OA growth: http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
Nor is there likely to be a discipline difference in the
logical principle that access is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for
impact...
Alas,
the evidence that supports the impact advantage
thesis is still too new and limited to be part of the scientists'
common
knowledge.
Then instead of denying the existence or scope of the growing evidence
of the OA
impact advantage across all disciplines, it might be more useful to
spread the
knowledge!
In
the end, who can be interested by institutional
repositories and "self-archiving" in its present form? Some are
because they really and deeply believe in the sharing values that are
at the
foundation of scientific exchange, and that is wonderful. That argument
is
rarely, if ever mentioned by the supporters of the "self-archiving"
strategy, but then altruism does not appear to be their forte. I must say that I find this call to appeal to
altruism
rather puzzling: Of course authors self-archive in order to maximize
access,
not just to maximize impact (in fact, maximizing impact depends totally
on
maximizing access!). And they are encouraged to self-archive to
maximize
access, if that is what impels them to do it! But the fact is that far
too few
authors are self-archiving for either reason (access or impact)
today.
And an appeal to self-interest seems rather more promising than an
appeal to
altruism at this sluggish point -- even though they are two sides of
the same
access/impact coin, and whatever maximizes the one, maximizes the other
too. Nor will self-archiving mandates be made more
palatable
to authors if they are based on an appeal to their altruism, rather
than on the
benefits that OA will confer on them -- even though, again, whatever
maximizes the
one, also maximizes the other. On
the other hand, others may do so because of a strong
obsession with their scientific status. They do not want any
impact-loss and
therefore "seek to eke," so to speak. In this case, the
"eking" is aimed at the last ounce of prestige that can be extracted
from their writing. From this perspective, Open Access
"self-archiving,"
even though the results are "iffy" at best, cannot hurt indeed.
However, my
impression is that very good people do not really need this step [to
maximize
impact by self-archiving]; very mediocre people will not benefit from
it
anyway. All research benefits from greater usage and
impact.
How the OA impact advantage distributes itself across the
quality/seniority/impact
hierarchy among articles and authors is an interesting empirical
question that we
will soon address. (J-CG seems to have some a-priori hypotheses that it
will be
interesting to text.)
Only
a few average scientists might benefit a little from
this strategy-hardly an earthshaking result. This is enough, in any
case, to
understand why self-archiving seems to generate so little enthusiasm at
present. Although J-CG does not appear very interested
in
gathering the pertinent empirical data himself, nor in examining the
data we
already have, he seems quite confident in making predictions and
generalizations about their outcome How
Should We Build Open Access? Does
all this mean that Open Access will not work? Of
course not! It does not even mean that "self-archiving" is
fundamentally a bad idea. It only means that claiming that the only or,
more
modestly, the best road to Open Access is "self-archiving" is
excessive, not to say wrong.
So far, all J-CG has actually said is that there is as yet very little
OA
self-archiving today: But that datum (15%)is contested by no one! I am
concerned
with finding ways to make that percentage grow (such as by designing
self-archiving software, citation-linking, citation analyses and search
engines, gathering and
disseminating the evidence on the OA advantage, designing and promoting
self-archiving policies, etc.), whereas J-CG seems to prefer to
theorize about
why Green doesn't grow, and won't.
It is unclear what "building Open Access collections" means: the outputs resulting
from institutional OA self-archiving policies? Those are best thought of not as
institutional OA collections but as institutional OA offerings!
Finally,
it means that we had better think about ways to
mix and match the "Green" and the "Gold" roads to Open
Access if we want to ensure success and accelerate the growth of Open
Access. It is not clear how this exclusive focus on the
slow
growth of Green (and the speculations as to why it has not grown
faster) gives
a hint of what mixing and matching with Gold might have to do with it:
J-CG
has, after all, not focused on the far slower rate of growth of Gold The
one recurring theme that emerges from the previous
discussion is value, and accessibility is but a tool to enhance it.
When they
play the part of an author, scientists obviously seek value (i.e.,
impact).
Value is perhaps the single most important element for the Open Access
movement
but in dealing with value the Open Access movement must not forget that
scientists
are also readers. At that precise moment, the "attention economy"
kicks in. Scientists look for value there too, but it is search and
retrieval
value that is of the essence in the scientist-as-reader context. Value
[impact], in short, is a little more complex than what the supporters
of pure
"self-archiving" imagine. In
the case of the "Gold" road, thinking about
value can be quite simple since it amounts to transposing the familiar
practices and strategies of the traditional publishing sphere. This is
exactly
what PloS and BioMed Central journals already strive to achieve, and
they are
already reaching interesting results. Likewise, the more national or
regional
approaches of Brazil and other Latin American countries (plus Spain)47
are also
bearing fruit. We may expect more of this latter kind of Open Access
journals
in the near future, particularly in countries like India48 and China.49
Similar
trends may appear in richer countries with a centralist political
tradition.
France,50 Italy,51 and Spain52 are prime candidates in this regard. In
the case
of France, various national research centers are already studying the
issue,
for example, CNRS (The French National Center for Scientific Research),
INSERM,
and INRA (The French National Institute for Agricultural Research). The
"Gold" road is not always an easy road to
follow. Stevan Harnad is right to underscore this point. But as the
previous
pages demonstrate, the "self-archiving" side is not easy to follow
either. The issue is not so
much ease
but speed, and probability. Both Gold and Green have been slow, but
Gold has
been three times as slow. (J-CG completely overlooks this fact,
stressing
endlessly the small number of articles that are made OA by
self-archiving,
ignoring that a three times smaller number is made OA by OA
publishing!) And
the probabilities are stacked much more heavily against Gold than
Green: Only
5% of journals are Gold; the other 95% are highly resistant to
converting
to Gold, and with good reason (financial risk). On the other hand, 93%
of
journals are Green. That means the only obstacle to 93% OA via Green is
the
slowness of authors to self-archive -- for which a self-archiving
mandate is
the obvious remedy. There is no corresponding remedy for the slowness
of
publishers to convert to Gold. Where
governments decide to move in and press for Open
Access publications, a great deal of time-consuming political
groundwork must
be done and requires countless interventions from people who need
support. But,
as we have seen, the need to rely on mandating shows that the
"self-archiving" side cannot avoid political maneuvers either.
Governments cannot and do not "move in and press for Open
Access publications": Whom can they press, how, to do what? All that
governments can do is to cover OA journal authors' publication fees.
What they can press for is Open Access itself. Research funders can
require their grantees to provide OA to their funded researchfindings --
by either self-archiving all the resulting non-OA journals articles
(Gold)
(Green)
or (if a suitable journal exists) publishingthem instead in an OA journal
(Gold)
-- as a precondition for receiving research
funding at all. And research funders now seem well on the way to pressingfor
exactly that. If/when they do, we will all be well on the way to 100% OA.
Business In
the cases of associations or society journals, the
issue of a business plan quickly surfaces and that is what the
"subsidized
author" model allows to explore. Various other schemes have been
suggested
to help the transition from a toll-gated to an open access journal, for
example, offering open choice to authors in order to demonstrate that
within a
particular journal (the "all things being equal" issue again) Open
Access articles enjoy a better impact on the average than their
toll-gated
counterparts.53 Recently,
we have seen at least one commercial publisher
(Springer) offering open choice to its authors.54 The move is certainly
bold,
especially with the steep up-front payment required, but it is also a
clever
move. Potentially, the following results can be demonstrated or
achieved
through such a move: 1.
It may reveal a new business plan where money can be
siphoned-off from granting agencies on top of what libraries already
provide.
In a world of plateauing library budgets, the perspective of extracting
some
money from the granting agencies to increase the revenue stream may
look quite
intriguing to a business leader who responds to his stock holders only. 2.
[Springer's 'Open Choice': author can choose to pay
for OA on a per-article basis] may also help set a value scale between
impact
factors and article costs.
There is already a way to translate the OA impact advantage into
dollars. For
example, the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) rankings -- in which
rank and funding are highly correlated with
citation counts -- can be re-calculated to show how much a rank would
be raised,
and how much more income would result, if a department or a university
mandated OA
self-archiving:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/
3.
Finally, it may also try to demonstrate that the whole
"author-pays" (so-called) business plan simply does not and cannot
work.55 Running an experiment within a large profitable company does
lead to a
great deal of leeway when time comes publicly to report financial
results and
interpret them. Ultimately,
the point of the "Gold" road is to
create intellectual value in new and better ways. 'Create intellectual value'? Is it not simpler
and more
theory-neutral to say that OA journals make their articles OA, and
charge the
author-institution, whereas non-OA journals charge the
user-institution? Do we
really need the theorizing about 'creating intellectual value'? After
all, we
all know what journals do: they implement peer review and tag the
result with
the journal's name, and its associated track-record for quality. OA and
non-OA journals
both do that; they just charge different parties for it. To
achieve this goal, the "Gold" road must pay
attention to more than the impact advantage that addresses only the
author side
of the scientist. A scientist is also a hurried reader and value can be
built
out of better searching, retrieving, and navigating tools. As a result,
all the
"Gold" projects should strive to collaborate to create citation links
and indices. Gold journals should certainly collaborate and
citation-link, and they do. But so do all the non-Gold journals (Green
and Gray)
do the same. And so do OA Archives and harvesters, like http://citebase.eprints.org/
.
So what is the point here? Meanwhile,
the role of the "Green" road must be
carefully and precisely defined. The "pale green" case should be
treated apart from the two other shades of Green, and this specific
status
should be clearly indicated in the metadata, particularly in OAI-PMH. I would suggest quite the opposite.
'Pale-Green'
(endorsing preprint self-archiving) is a journal policy (of 13%
of journals,
currently; 80% are Full-Green, endorsing postprint self-archiving).
Endorsing
preprint self-archiving is not a property of an OA article.
What an OA article
needs to indicate clearly is whether it is an unrefereed preprint or a
peer-reviewed postprint (along with the journal name in the latter
case). In
parallel, a very deep shade of Green should be set
aside for publishers that give an irrevocable right to "self-archive"
to their authors, or alternatively they could leave the copyright in
the
authors' hands. The reason is that we simply do not want to see
publishers
suddenly rescinding the permission to "self-archive" and thus
bringing down the whole OA edifice as if it were a house of cards.
Stevan
Harnad generally chooses to ignore this issue or treats it as useless
speculation, but the danger is much more concrete and real than he is
willing
to admit or concede. It is indeed completely useless speculation to
worry (Worry #32)
about Green reverting to Gray at a time when 93% of journals are Green
(80%
Full-Green) whereas only 20% of articles are OA! It is an utter waste
of time
to be contemplating the need for further shades of Green, rather than
self-archiving while the going's Green: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32.Poisoned
More
fundamentally, we must find a way to move from
institutional to disciplinary and even specialty repositories. This is
important because it is easier to create the former than the latter and
they
are presently multiplying. It is not only unimportant to move from local
institutional to central archives of any kind, but unnecessary and
counterproductive. In the distributed online age, contents are sorted
by
metadata tagging, not by physical locus or focus. And the author's
institution is the
natural locus for mandating institutional self-archiving, monitoring
compliance, and measuring and rewarding impact (for all of its
disciplines). http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Eprints_LP_paper.pdf However,
as we have seen, the effects of such
repositories are problematic at best and a failure now will set the
Open Access
movement back for many years. It becomes important therefore to move
beyond
simple, isolated, institutional repositories. This means aggregating
and
repackaging the information that is contained in these institutional
repositories along subject lines. In practice, this also means
inter-institutional collaboration and coordination.
(All these confident plans about which way institutional OA
self-archiving
archives need to go, having argued up to this point mostly against
their utility
a-priori!) What OA archives need is only one thing: OA
articles. And
what is needed to induce authors to self-archive their articles is a
self-archiving mandate. This has nothing whatsoever to do with
aggregating and
repackaging or with inter-institutional collaboration and coordination.
Each
institution need merely ensure that all of its own annual journal
article
output is self-archived in its own OAI-compliant OA archive. The rest
will take
care of itself, quite naturally, via OAI-interoperability (and the reciprocity
inherent in institutions self-archiving their own research output). In
an institutional repository, the metadata should be
organized in a sufficiently clear and standardized fashion to allow a
quick
disciplinary representation of what is available there. This would
allow the
efficient concatenation of disciplinary articles across a number of
depositories. The point, indeed, is that harvesting across all
repositories in
one simple, single sweep is not enough. While this task must be
maintained and
even enhanced, disciplinary harvesting must be available and be as
user-friendly and efficient as possible-a daunting problem in itself.
In
parallel, competitive forms of subject packages should also be allowed
to emerge.
This would lead to new value hierarchies and new ways to create value.
As a
consequence, the value creation capacity of toll-gated journals would
tend to
be somewhat diluted. Is J-CG proposing to re-invent the OAI
protocol? He is
breaking down open doors! And all of this has to do with
interoperability,
harvesting, and search. Nothing to do with diluting 'the value creation
capacity of toll-gated journals'! That is all just theory-spinning. One
day
100% Green OA might engender a transition to Gold -- or it
might not. Today, that is utterly irrelevant. What is relevant and
pressing today is the need
to reach 100% OA as soon as possible. That is already well within reach
and long
overdue.
What we need is not "new ways to create value", but new ways to accessthe value
we have created already -- for all those potential users who do not now have
access to that value.
These
goals raise a new question relating to ways and
means: Who should take charge of this new form of presentation? Who should take charge of what new form of presentation? And what does
'take
charge' mean? The OAI-PMH was created so OAI service-providers (like
OAIster
and Citebase) can 'take charge' of services like harvesting,
citation-linking
and search across the distributed, interoperable OAI-compliant OA
Archives. http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html
Institutions make their own journal article
output Open
Access by self-archiving it in their institutional OA Archives for all
potential users who cannot afford access to the non-OA version: What's
to be
taken charge of? And why is this a 'new form of presentation' rather
than a
complementary means of access? Actually,
the answer is not very difficult to sketch, but
we all know the devil will be in the details. Various consortial forms
already
exist among sets of libraries: licensing consortia, interlibrary loan
consortia, new kinds of consortia based on institutional repositories,
such as
the DSpace network.56 Consortia of any type among institutions that
view each
other as peers can become the bearers of these new kinds of
disciplinary
projects. In particular, the present deployment of DSpace might be a
good place
to start exploring and implementing such a strategy. In parallel,
licensing
consortia might consider extending their objectives to providing
support for
the creation of strong sets of disciplinary repositories across their
members.
Prestige hierarchies, based on the reputation of the institutions
involved,
will emerge from such efforts. In this complicated congeries of consortia,
could I ask a simple
question? What is this conglomeration all about? We are busy
conceptually
repackaging content that we do not have yet,
and content
[i.e., articles published in journals with names]
that will not need any repackaging.
Why are we not focusing on the practical task of actually providing the
(absent) content, now, instead of
theorizing about hypothetical future consortia to re-label and
redistribute it? I
would suggest starting not with peer-reviewed articles,
but rather with doctoral dissertations [emphasis added].
Here we have arrived at the heart of J-CG's proposal.
OA's target is peer-reviewed articles. Only 20% of them
are OA to date. And J-CG suggests that we not 'start' with them, but
with
self-archiving dissertations (some of which are being self-archived
today already).
(The answer will shortly become apparent: We
will
never
in fact be moving on to self-archiving peer-reviewed journal
articles, in J-CG's
recommended mix/match scenario: We will instead somehow -- it is never specified
quite how
(but one guesses that it is by going on to self-archive unrefereed
preprints
rather than peer-reviewed journal articles)
-- segue into the construction, bottom-up, of a brand new alternative
peer review
and publication
system, somehow, on top of these dissertations, to replace the existing
peer-reviewed journals.
This is in fact J-CG's version of the Golden road, of creating OA
journals; it is
not a mix-and-match of Green and Gold at all! It is an independent
reinvention of
the entire wheel. The first step is new forms of
"quality evaluation" -- arising, somehow, out of new ways of 'promoting
the
intellectual value' of doctoral dissertations) These
documents are totally controlled by university
professors and students, except in the case of patentable results
stemming from
doctoral research supported by private money. But these cases form a
minority
at best and can be left for special treatment. Meanwhile, an
interinstitutional strategy
to promote the intellectual value, authority, and prestige of doctoral
theses
could easily provide the testing ground for the emergence of
interinstitutional
disciplinary archives. I am at a loss: At a time when out of 2.5
million annual
peer-reviewed articles in 24,000 journals -- all of them already having
whatever intellectual value they already have --
only 20% are OA, we are being bidden to self-archive
dissertations and to promote their intellectual value! But isn't it the
other
80% of those already-evaluated but still inaccessible articles that we
really
need? And is this, then, the promised alterative Green-and-Gold
mix-and-match
proposal? Evaluation
Levels The
metadata should also be extended to provide some
indication of quality. Quality metadata? For dissertations? Whatever
for? We are
not trying to create a dissertation peer-review service. We are trying
to
provide OA for the other 80% of already peer-reviewed articles; and
their
'indication of quality' is the name of the journal that already
performed the
peer review on them! It
could be designed to help identify the identity and
the nature of the evaluating body that passes judgment over the
documents in
the repository. For journal articles, the 'evaluating body' is
the journal, tagged
by its name. For dissertations, who knows? (And who cares, insofar as
OA is concerned? Quality-tagging dissertations has
nothing to do with OA.)
In
other words, the metadata should help identify the
quality, nature, and procedures of groups that begin to work as
editorial
boards would. The metadata could also help design evaluations scales -
imagine
a one brain, two brain, ... n-brain scale, similar to a Michelin guide
for
restaurants. We don't need a Michelin guide to journal
articles! We
just need access to the articles, and their journal names! Here we are
instead
busy reinventing peer review, in hitherto untested and (as we shall
see) rather
extravagant new forms: Users
should have a clear idea of who the reviewers are
and how much they can be relied upon. Is J-CG suggesting that the journal name
(contrary to
what has been the case until today, irrespective of whether the journal
is
online or on-paper, OA or non-OA) is not enough? That articles should
be tagged
with the names of their (often anonymous) peer-reviewers too? (That
sounds
rather radical, for an untested proposal.) Or is this just about tagging dissertations
with their
university and committee names? (Fine, but how does that generalize to
journal
articles? And what has it to do with gaining Open Access to those
articles?) This
leads to a new project: If various universities
create consortia of disciplinary repositories, then nothing prevents
them from
designing procedures to create various levels of peer review
evaluation, e.g.,
institutional, consortial, regional, national, international.
This is a new project indeed! For the old project was to provide Open
Access to
the remaining 80% of the
existing 2.5 million annual articles in the existing 24,000
peer-reviewed journals. Now we are talking about what? Reviewing the
peer
review? Re-doing the peer review? Replacing the peer review? I suspect that -- driven by his
publication-reform theory
-- what J-CG is really contemplating here is entirely replacing the
non-OA
journals in which 95% of these self-archived articles are currently
being published! But OA itself is just about providing free, online
access to those peer-reviewed journal
articles, not about wresting them from the journals that published
them, and
from their peer-review -- at least not OA via the Green road of
self-archiving.
Nor is that what a journal means in giving its
Green
light to self-archiving: that you may treat my published articles as if
they
had never been peer-reviewed and published, and simply start the whole
process
anew! Nor is there any point in starting the whole process anew, if it
was done
properly the first time. It is hard enough to get qualified referees to
review
papers once, let alone to redo it (many times? at many "levels"?) all
over
again. Nor is that what the authors or the would-be
users of
those already peer-reviewed, published articles need or want. What
authors and
users want is Open Access to those articles. How did we get into this bizarre situation? It
was by
accepting the invitation to populate the OA Archives with dissertations
instead
of peer-reviewed journal articles, as a 'testing ground.' Apparently,
we are
never to graduate to self-archiving journal articles (Green) at all:
Rather, we
are to rebuild the whole publication system from the bottom up,
starting with
dissertations, and then generalizing and applying it to the unrefereed
preprints
of articles-to-be. (J-CG has wrongly inferred or imputed that "Green"
means mainly the self-archiving of unrefereed preprints, rather than
the peer-reviewed, published postprints that are OA's main target!)
In other words, we are to reform the
publication system after
all, just as J-CG recommended. Never mind about providing Open Access
to that
other 80% of existing journal articles: We will instead create new
evaluation
bodies (Gold). We have time, and surely all parties will eventually
go along with this project
(in particular,
those sluggish authors who had not been willing even to self-archive).
They are to
be weaned from their current journals and redirected instead to -- it
is not yet
altogether clear what, but apparently something along the lines of:
"various
levels of peer review evaluation, e.g., institutional, consortial,
regional,
national, international" At
that point, a recognized hierarchy of evaluation
levels can begin to emerge [emphasis added]; as such, it should
also be clearly identifiable
through the metadata. Not only could the user know what level of peer
review
and evaluation is being used, but also which group is backing it. In
effect,
this is what a journal does and this is how it acquires some branding
ability.
In effect, the current journal system is what J-CG is proposing
(because 95% of
journals have obstinately declined to go Gold) to replace (bottom-up, starting
with dissertations) with the above "emergent" Gold system, consisting
of "a
recognized hierarchy of evaluation levels" ("clearly identifiable
through the
metadata"). And this alternate "branding" system, starting with
dissertations, is
to emerge as a result of mixing-and-matching Green-and-Gold.
What follows is speculation piled upon
speculation, all
grounded in this initial premise (that if you can't convert them,
replace
them): An
international registry of such evaluation procedures
and of the teams of scholars involved could then be developed, perhaps
in
parallel to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) at Lund
University.
This obviously would lend transparency and credibility to these
value-building
procedures. In this fashion, a relatively orderly framework for
expanded peer
review and evaluation can emerge.
J-CG has here managed to resurrect here, almost
exactly, thevery same incoherence that beset Harold Varmus's original 1999
E-biomedproposal, which could never quite decide whether what was being
proposed was:
(1) free access to journal articles, (2) an archive in which to
self-archive
articles to make them freely accessible, (3) a rival publisher or
publishers to
lure away authors from existing journals (4) an alternative kind of
journal or
journals, with alternative kinds of peer review, or (5) all of
the
foregoing: http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45
That somewhat mixed-up and ill-matched 1999
vision is
what has since become gradually more sorted out and focused in the
ensuing years,
as follows: First, PubMed Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ was created (February,
2000) as a central OA archive in which publishers were invited to
deposit their
contents six months after publication. When few publishers took up that
invitation, the Public Library of Science (PloS) was founded (October
2000) and
circulated an Open Letter, signed by 34,000 biomedical researchers the
world
over, demanding that existing journals should go Gold http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml
. When that too failed, PLoS became an Open
Access
Publisher (2001) and has since launched two Gold journals
http://www.plos.org/journals/index.html
(forgetting altogether about Green
self-archiving). Most recently (2004),
perhaps having
noticed that the Golden road to OA is a rather long and slow one, PLoS
again
took up the Green road of self-archiving by helping to promote the NIH
public-access policy (which requests that all articles resulting from
NIH-funded research should be self-archived in PubMed Central within 6
months
of publication): http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html J-CG now proposes to resurrect something very
much like
the original 1999 matchless E-biomed mix once again! I would like to
make the
counter-proposal that once was enough: that we should forget about
trying to
rebuild the publishing system bottom up (with a vague, untested,
speculative,
and probably incoherent mix-and-match model of archiving and
publishing) and
instead reinforce the road that Harold Varmus, PLoS, the Wellcome
Trust, the UK
Government Select Committee, and many others have lately rejoined
(and the one they would have been better off taking in the first place)
-- the Green
road to OA -- by promoting the OA self-archiving of the remaining 80%
of the
existing journal literature as a condition of research funding (and
employment). In
parallel, these consortia should also work toward
enhancing the accessibility tools that will tend to make these Open
Access
resources as valuable and easy to use as the best commercial products.
In
particular, this could be the expected (but not necessarily exclusive)
province
of the librarians. These
remarks lead to intriguing possibilities. For
example, any paper could be evaluated more than once, and in any case
peer
review is certainly no longer limited to the prepublication stage. Now J-CG is resurrecting JWT Smith's (likewise
untested
and unrealistic) 1999 'Deconstructed Journal' proposal, and its easy
profligacy
with a rare and already overworked resource -- the pool of qualified
referees --
contemplating not just one but many peer-reviews for the same
article, at multiple stages and
levels. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0216.html
Yet recall (faintly, if you still can) how and
why this
all started out: The need to provide Open Access to the 2.5 million
annual
articles published in the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, because of the
many
potential users who could not afford the toll-access to them. Here we
are now,
offering them, in place of actual OA to the actual 2.5 million annual
articles,
hypothetical OA to hypothetical future articles, in hypothetical future
journals, refereed -- not just hypothetically but miraculously -- by
multiple
hypothetical systems of peer review, implemented by hypothetical
'Deconstructed
Journals.' Today's would-be user, denied access to those
of the 2.5
million actual articles he wants and needs, today, can be forgiven for
not
feeling much better off with what he is being offered here instead All
this demonstrates that new forms of evaluation can
(and probably will) develop. For example, while the number of formal
citations
obviously defines the impact of an article, the number of informal
citations-e.g., within the Web, the number of links that refer to a
particular
paper-can also provide further evaluation information.57 There
are further advantages accruing from this approach.
By involving researchers in the design of these new modes of
evaluation, the
debate about Open Access begins to take on a tangible, credible, even
vibrant
form. While thinking about evaluation, scientists should also begin to
understand how these new tools can improve both the process of
scientific
research and the management of a scientific career.
By moving in the direction
of Open Access, granting agencies can do their part and help clarify
the
evaluation levels and processes. In this fashion, they would
constructively participate in
the general reworking of value creation that is so lacking in pure
"self-archiving" at the present time.
Consider how much more OA granting
agencies would get in exchange for their pains if instead of
"clarifying evaluation levels and processes to constructively
participate in the general reworking of value creation" they simply mandated that
"pure self archiving that is so lacking at the present time":
That would ensure Open Access to the portion that they fund of the 2.5 million
annual articles in the world's 24,000 peer
reviewed journals -- an extant value that wants only access-creation,
not value re-creation.
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Those findings will be widely publicized to
researchers, but they will still not be enough to make enough
researchers
self-archive. Institutional and research-funder OA self-archiving
mandates are
needed.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/greenroad.html
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ACF1E88.pdf
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all&type=theses
Why are we being asked to start our mixing match with dissertations?
Finally,
scientific associations and societies that have
decided to go further than Pale Green can take advantage of this
situation to
create specialty juries and develop new metrics of science that will
ensure
pushing some articles up the value chain that would have simply been
ignored
otherwise. Many articles are regularly undervalued not because of their
content
but because they appeared in journals with a modest status. Others are
overvalued for symmetrical reasons. This part of the value creation
project can
take the form of the "Faculty of Thousand" invented by BioMed
Central, or it can take the form of prizes or any other form
susceptible of
attracting more attention to these articles. In short, "marketing"
could be totally redesigned along lines that have more to with the
quality of
content than with the ability to bundle huge amounts of articles and
titles.
Let us remember that the latter method-the "Big Deal"-amounts to
promoting mediocrity rather than excellence: It does so by making
inferior
products far more accessible and thereby artificially stimulates usage
through
a clever exploitation of the attention economy principles. And it
justifies all
this by using the fallacious pretext that the cost per title is
decreased!58
New
Journal Models
Transparency,
prestige, and rigor are needed to create
credible value. In effect, something like "overlay journals"59 begin
to emerge, and as such they can gradually acquire visibility and
respect. At
that point, the institutional repositories will have effectively
morphed and
matured into a consortium-based network of repositories with a rich set
of
value-creation tools and increasingly recognized names or labels.
The trouble is that all the "morphing" so far is happening only in the
mind of
the passive speculator; and meanwhile 80% of articles continue to be
inaccessible to those
would-be users who cannot afford access -- yet
that was supposed to be the
problem
OA was remedying.
Just like E-biomed and "deconstructed journals," "overlay journals" are at the
moment figments of the armchair theorist's imagination.
Moreover, it is not even clear what 'overlay journals' means. If it
just means
conventional journals (whether hybrid or online-only) implementing
online peer
review by having submissions deposited on a website and then directing
referees
and revised drafts to the site, then most journals are already overlay
journals
in this banal sense.
If 'overlay journals' means journals that are
online
only, then that is nothing new or interesting either. If it means that the archive
to
which the referees go to find the paper and where revised drafts are
put is not
the journal's website but an OA Archive (whether institutional or
central),
then that too is uninteresting -- just a trivial (and quite natural)
implementational variant of a standard feature
of extant journals and conventional (online) peer review: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/peerev.ppt
If the journal itself performs only peer review and certification -- and the
archives do
all access-provision and archiving, then this may have some potential
interest, some
day -- but there exist at most a handful of journals that resemble that
description today, and between them and the remaining 99.99% of
journals is the
still unsettled future of OA (Gold) journals and their cost-recovery
model.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2
So overlay journals are still just an armchair
speculation:
But 100% OA need not be -- and it certainly need not wait for the
'morphing' of the
current 24,000 journals into overlay journals.
As
a result of this evolution, overlay journals can hope
to become part of the search strategies of the scientists. Eventually,
original
submissions will be addressed to these new channels of scientific
communication. They will own a reputation, a profile, editorial
orientations,
and this despite, or in parallel with, the fact that most of these
articles (or
even all of them), at first, will have been already "published" in
traditional journals. This is where the importance of
"self-archiving" really finds its anchoring point.
It is hard to see how an article that has already been published in a
traditional
journal can become an "original submission" to an "overlay journal" --
harder still
to see this as self-archiving's real "anchoring point." Perhaps
self-archiving should just stick to the more mundane
task of providing immediate OA to the remaining 80% of the current
journal literature, rather than waiting for this hypothetical
new multilevel, multivalent system to evolve?
All
kinds of consortia should begin to engage in this
kind of activity, sometimes building on the experience gained from
doctoral
theses online, sometimes not, to enhance their offerings to their
constituencies. When "republishing overlay journals" turn into
original publishing channels, they will be equivalent to "Gold"
journals. The difference is that they will result from a succession of
small,
incremental, transformations rather than from a dramatic one-step
creation or
conversion of scientific journals. All this can be accomplished with a
good
alliance between librarians and scientists. All
this can be achieved by treating the
"self-archiving" strategy as a transition phase on the way to the
"Gold" objective.
The only "transition phase" that is worth
talking about (and
is tested, and visible, and reachable) is the transition from today's
20% OA to
100% OA via self-archiving. After that, nolo contendere --
and hypotheses non fingo!
Such
a strategy does not exclude
"self-archiving"; neither does it compete with the direct creation or
transition to Open Access journals. It simply welds these various parts
of Open
Access into a coherent vision of what Open Access ought to look like.
The
"Green" and "Gold" roads toward
Open Access will thus merge while helping each other. The haphazard,
anarchic
process of "self-archiving" will be made more orderly by the
disciplinary classifications and the evaluation hierarchies.
Researchers will know
that the collections are incomplete, but they will also know that they
are rich
and therefore quite valuable and useful. Moreover, various filters
corresponding to requirements about quality, beside those organized
around
topics (keywords, etc.), will greatly enhance the accessibility of
these
repositories. Discovering this will incite ever more people to
"self-archive." The fear of information overload will vanish.
Granting agencies will not have to fear the resistance of scientific
communities.
Finally,
because an even playing field will be
established between toll-gated publications and open access articles,
be they
"Gold" or "Green," the impact advantage of genuine Open
Access will have a much better chance of asserting itself unambiguously.
I still have no idea what this means! What is
meant by an
'even playing field' between OA and non-OA articles (as opposed to
articles
in OA journals
versus non-OA journals) when articles in the same non-OA
journal have
both non-OA and OA (self-archived) versions? How can an article, or
an OA
advantage, compete with itself? And why?
Probably
at this stage, the tipping point toward Open
Access will truly be in the offing.
Conclusion
The
vision presented here is nondogmatic. It leaves
plenty of room for revisions, critiques, and reevaluations. It tries to
present
a constructive evolutionary scenario where the "Green" and
"Gold" roads can find their proper place without feeling in
competition with one another. It also rests on the two following
premises that
some advocates of the "Green" road do not seem ready to accept:
1.
The finality of the scientific exchange is not just
for scientists-as-authors; it must also take into consideration the
scientist-as-reader, and it is in this context that the issue of Open
Access
must be complemented by that of "accessibility."
2.
Even if we accept reducing science to maximizing
impact-a dubious, simplistic claim, at best-scientists, now limited to
being scientists-as-authors,
appear
incapable of implementing a complete form of Open Access simply through
"self-archiving," be it mandated or spontaneous. In fact, the need to
rely on institutional policies and parliamentary committees
demonstrates the
incomplete nature of the "self-archiving" strategy taken in
isolation.
The assertion is clear. What is not at all clear is (1) how and
why is asserted to be
incapable of providing complete, 100% OA and -- especially (2) once it
is
mandated. Nor is it clear (3) why relying on a mandate means
self-archiving is
asserted to be
incomplete (rather than just too slow!).
If
we now refer back to the British Report from the
Commons Select Committee, we can now suggest a more interesting reading
of this
document. Far from putting all of its eggs in the first
"self-archiving" strategy and mentioning other actions only as
inferior and secondary (the "mandating" versus the
"recommending"), perhaps
the Select Committee meant to lay out a phased strategy: Right
now, they seem to say, we can begin by doing all the "self-archiving"
we can.In parallel, other strategies should be studied and implemented
later to
complete the "self-archiving" strategy and make it viable.
That is precisely what the UK Select Committee
did recommend: immediately
mandating OA self-archiving (Green),
and in parallel, continuing to support and study OA publishing (Gold). And
that was
indeed the right decision, and the right priorities and weight.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm
What
might be interpreted by some
"self-archiving" supporters as the results of a blurred vision may be
better interpreted as symptoms of deep wisdom indeed. It is not that
the
committee members "got it" on one point and wasted time on some
others; rather, they appear to have "gotten it" from beginning to end,
and this paper has done little more than try and argue why this is the
case. In
the end, Open Access will not be reached by a narrow focus on impact
optimization alone-although this argument is a very useful one-it will
be
reached only if the full complexity of the scientific communication
process is
taken into consideration.
Open
Access can be helped by tough-minded forms of
arguments. Taking the relentless quest for impact optimization as a
basis for
modeling scientific behavior does yield interesting working hypotheses;
however, it is false to assert that this is enough to encompass and
fully
apprehend the rich behavior patterns of those engaged in knowledge
creation and
validation. Fundamentally, science deeply agrees with Open Access not
only because
it is the best way to achieve the greatest impact for a particular
individual,
but also because it provides the most favorable environment to foster
the
widest form of distributed intelligence on this planet. And deploying
distributed intelligence should not be fostered for the sake of
intelligence
alone: This activity has meaning and use and all of humanity is
concerned by
it.
Presently,
scientific communication is limited roughly to
one fourth or one fifth of the individuals that, through their native
abilities, can contribute to scientific progress. Even in rich
countries, many
good brains are incapable of reaching their full potential and
therefore are
wasted because of the ways in which access to scientific literature is
limited.
Think of a promising young professor who must take a first job in a
small
college with limited library facilities (and probably limited lab
facilities as
well) simply because he happened to graduate in a period of PhD glut.
While
Open Access does hold the promise of enhancing the career of many
established
scientists, more fundamentally, it promises to create a much more open
field
for a widened circle of researchers. It can also reach into communities
of
concerned users. Think of patients seeking useful information to assist
in
their own treatment.
Open
Access should not be the tactical tool of a few,
elite, established, scientists that want to enhance their careers and
little
else;
No one has suggested OA is, or should be the
tactical
tool of a few, elite, established, scientists. It is J-CG, however, who
suggested (without saying how, or why) that impact enhancement through
OA
self-archiving would only benefit the elite, established scientists.
The
analysis by author/article seniority and quality-level is yet to be
done, but
there is no particular reason to expect that the OA-impact advantage will be only,
or even mostly, at the top.
neither
should it be approached only from a kind of
Hobbesian attitude where the worst scenario is used to demonstrate that
even
seen in this dire way, things turn out right in the end. OA mainly aims
at
improving the knowledge creation system of science and better insert
its
results within our societies.
Open
Access does not need to draw an absolute knowledge
divide between scientists and the rest of the population, between
elites and
the "masses";
Who is drawing such a divide? Most of the
annual 2.5
million articles published in the world's peer-reviewed journals are
specialized scholarly/scientific articles that are only of interest to
fellow-specialists; but OA articles are accessible to any interested
user. So
what is the problem?
while
it does not eschew vigorous competition, Open
Access insists that the playing field should remain reasonably even and
fair.
Vigorous competition between what and what?
(J-CG again seems to be thinking only in terms
of OA journals vs. non-OA journals here.)
In
the end, Open Access is the sine qua non condition for
the optimal deployment of scientific research worldwide, as well as for
its
widest applicability in the general population.
And
if, finally, some people should object to the last
argument as being irrelevant to scientific research, they should also
remember
that the public pays for much of it.60
Acknowledgement
Several
people have had a very direct and most precious
input into this paper and I would like to thank them for having taken
the time
to read this little study. I want also to thank them for having
occasionally
saved me from my own foolishness. In this group, I would like to
include Fred
Friend, the well named, David Prosser, Colin Steele, and Ray Siemens. I
would
also like to thank the editors and referees for their useful and
important
comments. Last, but not least, I want to mention my very dear Frances,
better
known to most librarians as Frances K. Groen; please accept this modest
expression of my fullest gratitude.
References
1
The Open Access movement has been characterized by a
common objective-namely Open Access to peer-reviewed, scholarly
articles-and a
dual strategy to attain this objective. See the Budapest Open Access
Initiative
(BOAI) published on the Web on February 14, 2002,
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml. To qualify
as Open Access, a document must follow two different
sets of conditions that were clearly outlined in the Bethesda
declaration,
http://www.earlham.edu/ peters/fos/bethesda.htm#note1. (1) The user is
granted
a number of rights (e.g., "a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual
right
of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and
display the
work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works"); (2) the
document must be archived "in at least one online repository that is
supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government
agency, or
other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access";
these are the exact words of the Bethesda Statement on Open Access.
They refine
and elaborate upon the definition that emerged with BOAI. The Public
Library of
Science endorses the Bethesda definition of Open Access (see
http://www.plos.org/about/openaccess.html).
The term 'Open Access' was coined and defined
by the
BOAI, and, as noted, two roads to OA were specified : the Green
road
(BOAI-1, OA self-archiving of articles published in non-OA journals)
and the
Gold road(BOAI-2, publishing articles in OA journals). The Bethesda
statement
was the first of several subsequent statements and declarations that
re-focussed both the definition of OA and the strategy for achieving it
on Gold
alone. Note how in the Bethesda statement, self-archiving (BOAI-1) has become merely 'archiving'
(which is of
course a necessary condition for both Gold and Green, for even Gold
must
provide free online access somehow!). That, together with the
(needless)
stipulation that OA requires rights re-negotiation (which it does not, for what is already
at least 93%
of journals!), effectively meant that the only articles that would be
considered OA would be those that were either published in OA journals
or in
journals that were prepared to become formal OA journals-on-demand on
an
individual-article basis. Self-archived articles -- even those from
most of the
93% of journals that are Green -- would not count as OA according to
this new
Bethesda criterion, because they had not renegotiated rights with the
publisher
to make them exactly equivalent to articles published in an OA journal!
This
unnecessary, arbitrary and counterproductive criterion was subsequently
propagated
to the Berlin Declaration and most further formal statements on OA for
several
years, with the result that OA was taken to be equivalent to OA
publishing
(BOAI-2) and self-archiving was relegated to its archiving dimension,
rather
than the independent -- and far more powerful and direct -- Green road
to OA
provision that it is, and continues to be, according to the original
BOAI
definition!
2
This "reader pays" phraseology is as
inaccurate as the "author pays" expression. Later in this text, we
shall speak about a "subsidized author.".
This is correct. The descriptor should be
'author-institution payment' vs. 'user-institution payment' (the former
being
the OA publishing cost-recovery model and the latter being the non-OA
publishing cost-recovery model: subscriptions, site-licenses,
pay-per-view).
Just as non-OA online access is no longer based on individual payment,
but
institutional payment, neither OA nor non-OA authors are meant to pay
anything
out of their individual pockets.
3
This is, at best, shorthand for journals deriving their
income at the point of production and not at the point of sale.
Effectively,
the point of sale disappears with Open Access. Someone, perhaps a
granting
agency, a foundation, a research institution, or even in some rare
cases, an
author, pays the publishing fee set up by the publisher. A better
expression
would be "paid on behalf of the author," which is accurate but a
little unwieldy. Perhaps a "subsidized author" would foot the bill
and provide a nice parallel for the "subsidized reader" expression
used later on.
4
In India, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, etc. See notes 47-52.
5
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt, slide 47. Specifically, Harnad writes:
"Open access through author/institution self-archiving is a parallel
self-help measure for researchers, to prevent further impact-loss now.
Open
access is a supplement to toll-access, but not necessarily a substitute
for
it." Note the reference to "impact-loss." This is really a
"manque-ˆ-gagner" (loss of possible gains) rather than a direct loss.
What Harnad means to say is not that impact already gained is going to
be lost;
it is that impact that might be added to already gained impact is not
being
added. What
he
really meant to write is that self-archiving is a self-help measure to
open up
the possibility of further impact gains.
Correct. Self-archiving is author-institution self-help to
maximize impact
(or minimize the loss of potential
impact) by providing online access to all would-be users, web-wide, and
not
just those whose institutions can afford paid access.
6
See
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/. The SHERPA
version of
RoMEO, which is to be preferred as it is current, can be found at
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php. SHERPA is funded by JISC and CURL.
It is
hosted by the University of Nottingham. The "Green" and
"Gold" terminology itself seems to have been invented by Stevan
Harnad while discussing the results stemming from the RoMEO study.
The information on individual journal
self-archiving
policy (rather than just publisher self-archiving policy) is available
at http://romeo.eprints.org/
-- a site which also dispenses with the excessive, unnecessary
and
uninformative color codes at the SHERPA site (yellow, blue, red, white)
and
provides the relevant information: Green light to self-archive
peer-reviewed
postprint, FULL-GREEN [70%]; pre-refereeing preprint, PALE-GREEN [13%],
neither
yet, GRAY [7%].
7
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmsctech.htm.
8
A summary of the House Committee recommendations (July
15, 2004) can be found at the following URL:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=o31. For the publishers'
reactions, see their open letter to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, dated August
28, 2004, available
at http://www.pspcentral.org/. It is important to read the full letter
rather
than the excerpts published by Ann Okerson on Liblicense-l on August
30th
(http://www.library.yale.edu/ llicense/ListArchives/0408/msg00137.html).
9
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Hypermail?Amsci/3875.html.
10
The tradition of exchanging offprints among scholars
and researchers is a clear example of a situation where affordability
and
access are sharply kept distinct.
More accurate description: Researchers
generally provide
access to their own work merely in order to provide access (and
maximize
impact), with no thought one way or another regarding journal pricing
or
affordability! If forced to think about it explicitly, researchers
would no
doubt agree that (1) if their work were already available online to all
of its
potential users (2) then they would not need to bother self-archiving
and that
(3) this would be the case if every journal in which they published
were
affordable to and licensed by every institution of every potential user
-- but (4) unfortunately it is not. The reasoning from 1-4 is rather
trivially
obvious, however, and need not really be explicitly formulated in order
to arrive at
this much simpler decision: I will
self-archive in order to maximize the access to and the impact of my
work!
11
This is an allusive reference to a very recent
discussion (August 6, 2004),
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&O=D&F=l&P=68397.
12
For an interesting discussion on the number of
refereed journals and articles, see http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2983.html. The figures quoted in this discussion
range
from 15,000 titles (Eugene Garfield) to 24,000 titles (Stevan Harnad)
with a
corresponding spread in the number of articles published annually: from
1.5 to
2.5 million-the ratio of 100 articles/journal/year is commonly used in
the
scientific, technical, and medical disciplines (STM). The figure of 85%
dates
back to the early part of August 2004. On August 25th, Stevan Harnad
advanced the
93% figure along with the conversion of the Royal Society of Chemistry
(http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3938.html).
This is all correct. It should only be added
that it
makes no difference whether the true number of peer-reviewed journals
is closer
to 12,000 (Garfield), 24,000 (Ulrichs) or 48,000 (as others have
suggested).
The percentage Green is an estimate based on a sample of publishers (107 publishers, publishing
9000
journals, and including the top journals in most fields), and the
relative
amount of OA via Green and Gold is in the ratio of 3/1 regardless of
what the
true percentage of the total is.
13
It must be noted that until publishers gave their
various forms of Green light to self-archiving, its very possibility
was very problematic
at best. From the standpoint of intellectual property laws, no one has
tested
Harnad's tactic of archiving two files (submitted file plus
corrigenda)-a point
which would worry any university manager in charge of an institutional
repository. This approach has to be tested in at least two ways: with
regard to
the notion of derivative work, and also plagiarism. It may sound
strange to say
that an author could be accused of plagiarizing himself or herself, but
copyright law, let us remember, deals with property, intellectual
property in
this case, and signing away copy rights is signing intellectual
property away.
Copyright laws emerged in part to prevent an author from selling a
manuscript
to several publishers. Without the publishers' agreement,
self-archiving is
also problematic from a practical standpoint. I shall return to this
point
later.
All of this is irrelevant and unnecessary, and
sounds
like a call for (retrospective!) Zeno's Paralysis: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3188.html
. Authors who have been self-archiving since the early '90's
have
sensibly just gone ahead and self-archived instead of waiting for a green light
from anyone (let alone worrying that once given, it might be taken back again)!
For example, out of 300,000 papers
self-archived by
physicists since 1991, only 4 have since been withdrawn citing
copyright
considerations http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3188.html.
Had the authors of those 300,000 papers instead
thought
along the lines J-CG seems to be thinking (and recommending?), over a
decade of impact would have been needlessly lost for those authors --
as it was
lost for that vast majority of authors who did not self-archive during that decade!
14
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html.
15
See, for example, Stevan Harnad's reaction to an
article in an Indian publication at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3156.html (accessed November 8, 2003).
16
See, for example, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3161.html (accessed November 12, 2003) where
Stevan
Harnad writes: "I'm afraid that all this eminently accessible open
access
will continue to be needlessly delayed as long as our attention and
enthusiasm
continue to be directed solely or primarily at the slower road. We
should
really be promoting both roads, and each in proportion to its immediate
capacity to deliver Open Access. What is happening now is instead
rather like
trying to increase the population by promoting in vitro fertilization
alone,
neglecting the faster, surer path..." Note, in passing, the rhetoric:
Gold
is to Green as in vitro fertilization is to natural fertilization! The
metaphor
is funny because it caricatures the situation. But it is only a
caricature, not
an analysis.
17
See http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3162.html. Harnad estimates that 10% of all
articles are
in Open Access. Of these, one fourth or 2.5% of all articles published
appear
in Gold publications while about three fourths or 7.5% of all articles
published appear in Green titles. While 85% of all articles could
potentially
be placed in Open Access, about a tenth of that quantity actually is.
18
Harnad, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt, slides 42-43.
19
Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge,
Les Carr, and Stevan Harnad, "The Impact of OAI-based Search on Access
to
Research Journal Papers" (September 2003),
http://opcit.eprints.org/serials-short/serials11.html.
20
Some authors have defined impact differently. For
example, Sidney Redner suggests to multiply the total number of
citations by
their average age. This suggests that measuring impact is not as simple
and
transparent as a simple citation count suggests, but I shall not
address this
question here and will act as if citation counts suffice. See S.
Redner,
"Citation Statistics from more than a Century of Physical Review"
(July 27, 2004), http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0407137.
The latest findings on the self-archiving OA
advantage
show that it is present across years, for recent and 10-year-old
articles
alike. (What is not yet taken into account yet, however, is when the self-archiving was actually done.)
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
21
Steve Lawrence, "Online or Invisible?"
http://www.neci.nec.com/ lawrence/papers/online-nature01/. Edited
version
appears in Nature 411, no.6837 (2001): 521.
22
See, for example, Stevan Harnad, Tim Brody, Francois
Vallires, Les Carr, Steve Hitchcock, Yves Gingras, Charles Oppenheim,
Heinrich
Stamerjoanns, and E.R. Hilf, "The Green and the Gold Roads to Open
Access," Nature (Web focus) (2004),
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html. See also
Michael J.
Kurtz, "Restrictive Access Policies Cut Readership of Electronic
Research
Journal Articles by a Factor of Two" (2004),
http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19oa/kurtz.pdf, and Andrew M. Odlyzko, "The
Rapid Evolution of Scholarly Communication." Learned Publishing 15
(January 2002): 7-19,
http://www.catchword.com/alpsp/09531513/v15n1/contp1-1.htm.
23
See note 9 above.
24
Educom Review Staff, "Networked Information:
Finding What's Out There-Clifford A. Lynch Interview," Educom Review
32-36
(1997), http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/review/reviewarticles/32642.html.
25
Incidentally, why has no librarian, so far as I know,
ever tried to implement a similar system on any campus? I have not
systematically investigated this question and I would be delighted to
stand
corrected.
26
Kenneth Frazier, "The Librarians' Dilemma.
Contemplating the costs of the 'Big Deal'", D-Lib Magazine 7 (March
2001)
(3) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html..
27
http://www.crossref.org/,
http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/sfx.htm. Elsevier's Scopus proceeds from
the same
argument. It also introduces fascinating implications about who will
eventually
control the search engines of science: Google, ISI's Web of Science, or
Elsevier's Scopus?.
28
This is the case with the "Digital Object
Identifier" (DOI). As stated in the DOI Handbook, "specifically, DOI
relies on copyright and trademark law to protect the DOI brand and
reputation.
DOI is not a patented system; the IDF has not developed any patent
claims on
the DOI system and does not rely on patent law for remedy,"
http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/governance.html#7.2.
29
See http://paracite.eprints.org/,
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs.
30
Carl Lagoze (Cornell University) and Herbert Van de
Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratories) are two of the leaders of the
OAI-PMH
protocol.
31
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/view.cfm.
32
At the hearings of the UK Commons Select Committee,
the Royal Society of Chemistry advanced this kind of argument in the
following
terms: "Currently most authors care where their work is seen and who it
is
seen by far more than they care about how many people have seen it,"
"Scientific Publications Free for All," the Science and Technology
Committee of the UK House of Commons, vol. II, Oral and Written
Evidence, p.
EV-209 (p. 217, section 4.5 within a PDF reader). This statement is
quoted in
the main report (p. 9, item 8) and commented as follows: "This dispute
goes to the core of the question of who should pay for the costs of
scientific
publications: those who argue in favor of the widest possible
dissemination
tend to be more receptive to the author-pays model of publishing; those
who
prefer targeting publications at a small, selected audience tend to be
more
content to maintain the status quo."
Although it thus argues against Gold, the Royal
Society
of Chemistry has
nevertheless gone Green:
http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers/63.html
Odlyzko,
on the other hand, suggests that Open Access
brings the literature to new categories of readers (and appears to
enjoy it):
"Much of the online usage appears to come from new readers (...) and
often
from places that do not have access to print journals." Odlyzko, "The
Rapid Evolution," 8. As Odlyzko puts it, "... scholars ... are
engaged in a 'war for the eyeballs'." Ibid., p. 9.
33
We are talking about impact factors here, as we are
dealing with "Gold" journals. For good or bad reasons-probably bad
ones in fact-most scientists are more familiar with impact factors than
with
impact (and their tenure and promotion committees also).
34
ADS = Astrophysics Data System. The part in brackets
that clarifies Michael Kurtz' statement presumably comes from Stevan
Harnad as
moderator of the American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum,
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&O=A&F=l&P=44671.
35
Ibid.
36
On this concept, see Michael H. Goldhaber, "The
Attention Economy and the Net," First Mondgy,
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ (accessed April
1997).
37
Odlyzko, "The Rapid Evolution.".
38
The original article is Samuel C. Bradford,
"Sources of Information on Specific Subjects," Engineering 137
(January 26, 1934): 85-86. The law of concentration appears in Eugene
Garfield,
"The mystery of the transposed journal lists-wherein Bradford's law of
scattering is generalized according to Garfield's law of
concentration,"
Essays of an Information Scientist (Philadelphia, ISI Press, 1977):
222-223.
The original article appeared in August 1971. Conversely, Garfield's
law of
concentration could be (ironically?) read as a way to justify a more
pragmatic
and relaxed attitude to the documentation search problem.
39
See for example the recent remarks by Heather
Morrison,
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&O=D&F=l&P=69057.
For a related argument, see Eugenio Pelizarri, "Harvesting for
Disseminating. Open Archives and Role of Academic Libraries" to be
published in January 2005 in the Acquisitions Librarian. Available
online at
http://www.bci.unibs.it/doc/Pelizzari-REVIEWED-harvesting%20for%20disseminating%20FINAL.doc.
40
It works rather well, but it is not perfect, far from
it. David Goodman, whom I thank, has attracted my attention on a study
done by
PŽter Jacs— ("PŽter's Picks and Pans CiteBaseSearch, Institute of
Physics
Archive, and Google's Index to Scholarly Archive," Online 28, no.5
(September 5, 2004): 57-58, showing that Google did not perform all
that well
on deep searches within Open Access databases. A summary of the results
is
found on Peter Suber's precious Weblog on Open Access:
http://www.earlham.edu/
peters/fos/2004_08_29_fosblogarchive.html#a109406153195893347.
41
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/.
42
See the description of the article base at
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/description.html. In a recent
intervention, Stevan Harnad writes, "But Pubmed and PMC are not only
better because of their better search features (which can all, of
course, be
fully duplicated by OAIster and by any other OAI search engine,
whenever we
wish to implement them!):..."
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&D=0&F=l&O=D&P=68930.
However, if this search engine is so simple to duplicate, why is it not
already
done?.
Because OAIster does not yet have remotely
enough OA
content to make the effort worth its while! Most effort now needs to be
invested in generating more OA content, not it in gussying up the
little OA
content we have!
43
Stevan Harnad, www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt, slide 45: "Don't conflate the different
forms of institutional archiving.".
44
It is important to recall that the varieties of Green
involve a shade of Pale Green limiting "self-archiving" to preprints.
In Stevan Harnad's powerpoint presentation (www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt, slide 41), the Pale Green publishers
account
for 30% of all publications but they are not treated separately,
presumably on
the basis that the preprint plus corrigenda strategy is realistic.
Personally,
I have always questioned the viability (and even legality) of the
"self-archiving" strategy to the point that I had given very little
credence to "self-archiving" before "real" Green publishers
began to be identified in the RoMEO project.
Fortunately, the authors of, for example, the
300,000 physics
papers and the 500,000 computer science papers that have been
successfully and
uncontestedly self-archived since the early '90's did not think the
same way
J-CG does in this matter! (Moreover, the percentage of Pale-Green
journals has further shrunk from 30% to
13% since J-CG wrote these words?)
45
This remark applies particularly well to scientists in
poor or in "transition" countries.
46
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt, slide 47.
47
See http://www.scielo.org/index.php?lang=en.
48
See, for example, http://www.jpgmonline.com/. The
Indian Academy of Science has also placed its journals in Open Access.
See
Subbiah Arunachalam, "India's march towards open access," SciDev.net
(March 5, 2004),
http://www.scidev.net/Opinions/index.cfm?fuseaction=readOpinions&itemid=243&language=1.
49
Some ideas about China's evolution with regard to Open
Access can be found in Liu Chuang, "Recent Development in Environmental
Data Access Policies in the Peoples' Republic of China,"
http://books.nap.edu/books/0309091454/html/74.html#pagetop.
50
For France, the best sites to find information on Open
Access are HŽlne Bosc's site
(http://www.tours.inra.fr/prc/internet/documentation/communication_scientifique/comsci.htm#auto)
and the INIST site (http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/).
51
See, for example, Susanna Mornati, "Progetto
AEPIC: gli archivi aperti italiani su une piattaforma nazionale,"
http://e-prints.unifi.it/archive/00000461/01/1_multipart_xF8FF_2_Relazione_Mornati.pdf.
and Valentina Comba, AEPIC Academic E-Publishing Infrastructures-CILEA:
Progetto di editoria elettronica per la ricerca e la didattica (2002),
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00000066/01/AEPIC-CO511.pdf.
52
Spain appears a little behind in the Open Access
movement. However, the efforts of Crist—bal Pasadas Ure–a (University
of
Granada) must be noted (he pushes for Open Access within IFLA, for
example).
Likewise, Catalonia appears to be moving ahead, at least with theses
and
dissertations (http://www.tdx.cesca.es/index_tdx_an.html).
53
On both fronts, the Information Program of the Open
Society Institute has been extremely active and useful.
54
http://www.lib.utk.edu/mt/weblogs/scholcomm/archives/000300.html. The
new
Springer is the result of the merging of the old Springer plus Kluwer.
The CEO
for this new publishing behemoth is Derk Haank, formerly
Reed-Elsevier's CEO. A
better understanding of what is happening at the new Springer can be
derived
from the fascinating interview of Derk Haank, "Put up or Shut up,"
recently published by Richard Poynder
(http://www.infotoday.com/it/sep04/poynder.shtml).
55
Springer places a US$3,000 fee on its articles, i.e.,
twice as much as PloS. This is how Derk Haank explains this decision in
his
interview with Richard Poynder: "As always, I am very serious-$3000 is
a
very competitive price. Even Open-Access advocates would have to
acknowledge
that. The Wellcome Trust report, for instance, estimated the true cost
of
publishing a paper at more like $3500.".
56
On DSpace, see McKenzie Smith, "An Open Source
Dynamic Digital Repository,"
http://www.mybestdocs.com/smith-m-etal-dspace.htm. It was originally
published
in D-Lib Magazine 9, no.1 (2003).
57
See Odlyzko, "The Rapid Evolution," p. 9.
58
This is the argument that David Kohl, for example,
regularly gives in his talks. See, for example, "Better value from
bigger
deals: issues and experience" available from
http://www.subscription-agents.org/conference/200302/ as a PowerPoint
presentation.
59
The expression "overlay journal" may not
satisfy all and other terms have been suggested, such as "Article
Database" or "deconstructed journal." Debates and usage will
eventually stabilize these terms. On the notion of "deconstructed
journal,
see John W. T. Smith, "The Deconstructed Journal-A New Model for
Academic
Publishing," Learned Publishing 12, no.2 (April 1999),
http://library.kent.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/d-journal.htm.
All these expressions are unsatisfactory,
because the
concepts behind them are premature and have not been carefully
thought-through (let alone tested and shown to be viable!). If/when journals ever decide to become (1)
online-only and
to offload all (2) text-generation, (3) archiving and (4)
access-provision on
the author's institutional OAI archive network, (5) leaving the journal
with
only the service of peer review to perform, and its outcome to certify
with its
journal-name, then the
journal-name will be the certification tag (no 'overlay journals' to
speak of)
and the journal will have become a peer-review service provider. (Still
nothing
like a 'deconstructed' journal, which is, and will probably remain, an
untested, unrealistic, and probably incoherent hypothesis.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0216.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0943.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2897.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3806.html
).
60
A very recent (September 3, 2004) statement released
by NIH completely supports this view. See: "Notice: Enhanced Public
Access
to NIH Research Information,"
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html.
Thanks to
the guest editor for this issue of Serials Review for having attracted
my
attention to this document.
What is needed today is already quite clear: 100% OA by the fastest and
surest
means possible. It is also clear what that means is: self-archiving
(Green),
which now
needs to be mandated by researchers? institutions and funders. There is
also scope
both for the growth of OA journals (Gold) and for experimentation with
hypothetical new systems in parallel with the self-archiving of
all peer-reviewed,
published journal articles (Green) -- but not in place of it.
Let there be no mix-up about that!
Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Alma Swan for her astute and
helpful remarks on
this critique.