From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Oct 1 00:03:09 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:51 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA In-Reply-To: <200509302206.j8UM6bar005056@quickgr.its.yale.edu> Message-ID: On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Phil Davis wrote: > In effect, there may be two complimentary processes taking place at the > same time: 1) A self-promotion effect (Wren's Trophy Effect, where authors > are more likely to promote their own high-impact articles) 2) The Mathew > Effect (where readers are more likely to cite high-impact articles) There is no doubt that there is more incentive to make an article one thinks is especially important more widely visible and accessible by self-archiving it. And of course, visibility and accessibility influence what one can and does use and cite (though it was only a Matthew Effect when the prestige of your journal and institution and even your own current reputation were the determining factors: OA levels the playing field). > If we take these two axioms as being true, then generalizations (like open > access publishing increases citations from 50%-250%) When will the message penetrate that the 50%-250% citation advantage data are *not based on OA publishing*! They are based on OA self-archiving of articles published in non-OA journals. > should not be made > without sufficient qualifications. It may be more reasonable to say that > "author republishing/redistribution may increase citation impact, > especially among highly prestigious journals and authors". It is not republishing. Self-archiving is online-access provision to material that is published (once, and only once) in the journal it was published in. It is supplementary distribution. The relative weights of the components of the OA self-archiving advantage (Early Advantage, Usage (Download) Advantage, Quality Advantage (Level Playing Field), Quality Bias (Self-Selection of higher-Q work), Competitive Advantage (of self-archived articles over non-self-archived articles in the same journal), etc., will need to be analyzed, explicitly and carefully. Otherwise all we have is intuitive hunches about their respective contributions. "OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA" http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html We will soon test the intuitive hunch that it is the high-impact journals' articles that are currently being self-archived more... Stevan Harnad > SOURCES > > Merton, Robert K. "The Mathew Effect in Science", Science. Jan 5, 1968 > 159(3810):56-63 > Can be found in JSTOR > > Jonathan Wren's study in BMJ. 2005 May 14; 330(7500): 1128. > "Open access and openly accessible: a study of scientific publications > shared via the internet" > http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/330/7500/1128 > > Kristin Antleman's paper in CREL Sept. 2004 65(5), p.372 -382 > "Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact? > http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/kaantelm/do_open_access_CRL.pdf > > > At 10:57 PM 9/29/2005, you wrote: > >Dear Phil, > > > >since I know you to be a better statistician than I, what is your > >evaluation of the two separate studies: > > [SNIP] > > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Oct 3 22:02:17 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: How to compare research impact of toll- vs. open-access research In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Prior Amsci Topic Thread: "How to compare research impact of toll- vs. open-access research" (started June 2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2858.html On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > The problem is, there is no evidence of correlation between citations and > the return on research expenditure. Citations *are* one measure of return on research expenditure. Research is funded in order to be applied and built-upon, i.e., to be *used*; citations are an index of that usage. Uncited, unused research may as well not have been conducted, and represents *no* return on the research investment. Whatever increases usage and citations, increases the return on the research investment. Any loss of such a potential increase is a loss of potential return on the research investment. Self-archiving increases citations 50%-250%. Hence the failure to self-archive loses 50%-250% of the potential return on the research investment. > I haven't been able to trace many analyses which do look at this (Don > King will know, if anyone does) but those I've read look at output of > articles, registration of patents, and Gross Domestic Product. Article counts are a measure of the return on the research investment, but far too crude a measure, for, as noted, the articles may not be used. Patents are pertinent only to a tiny portion of the research literature, so have insufficient generality to be a useful general measure of research impact. Moreover, they are often based on *unpublished* research, whereas self-archiving and the OA movement are directed specifically at published research. However, patent counts and citation counts are in fact positively correlated: "patent volume is positively correlated with paper citations, suggesting that patent counts may be reasonable measures of research impact" Agarwal, A. & Henderson, R. (2002) Putting Patents in Context: Exploring Knowledge Transfer from MIT. Management Science 48 (1), 44-60 https://dspace.mit.edu/retrieve/3871/IB_Putting%2BPatents.pdf Gross domestic product is again too crude. Most basic research is too far from practical applications to contribute to the GDP. But one thing is certain: If a piece of research is to make a contribution to the GDP, it must be accessible to its potential appliers. Self-archiving substantially increases accessibility, as indicated by the fact that it generates substantially more citations. I too would be interested, however, to know of studied correlating GDP with citation counts. > Clearly, we are a long way off being able to analyse whether or not > self-archiving (or any other form of open access) does or does not > contribute to these objective output measures. I thought the question was about whether citation counts are correlated with these measures. We already know that self-archiving is correlated with increased citation counts. > But to pretend that we 'know' citations are a proxy for any of them is > not, to my mind, an argument that holds any water The claim was not that citations are a proxy for GDP, but that citations are a (face-valid) measure of the return on the investment of public funds in research -- and, more particularly, that the loss of potential citations is the loss of potential returns on the investment of public funds in research (lost "value for money"). > Stevan, I know what you're going to say so please don't bother - frankly, I > am more interested in hearing what other people have to say Sally, I'd be pleased to obey your request not to reply to you, if this were only a private conversation between you and me. But, you see, others are involved too, in particular, researchers and their interests. You appear to be concerned about hypothetical future losses to publishers because of self-archiving -- losses for which there exists no evidence at all to date. I am concerned about actual current losses to researchers for not self-archiving -- losses for which the sizeable positive correlations between self-archiving and citation counts, and between citations counts and researcher revenue (in terms of both salary and research funding) constitute strong positive evidence. See, for example, the many studies showing the correlation between RAE rankings and citation counts, as cited here: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ In particular, Eysenck & Smith (2002) write: "Correlation between RAE ratings and mean departmental citations +0.91 (1996) +0.86 (2001) (Psychology)" "RAE and citation counting measure broadly the same thing" http://cogprints.org/2749/ Stevan Harnad Harnad, S. (2005) Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11220/ From bioforma at wanadoo.fr Wed Oct 5 08:54:25 2005 From: bioforma at wanadoo.fr (bioforma-news) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] bioforma : free download french biological book Message-ID: <4343db6a$2$1011$8fcfb975@news.wanadoo.fr> BIOFORMA puts on line free the Notebooks of medical biology bioforma is the national organism of the professional continuing education of the French biologists bioforma allows the biologists to follow of the formations all along the professional course, 14.500 days of practicums in 2005 as well as of the interactive formations (e-learning) via internet in hematology parasitologie mycology spermiologie and bacteriology. on www.bioforma.net the notebooks of biology are free downloading. 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From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Oct 6 09:41:43 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: [SOAF] question about green policies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Why not look directly at http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php to get this breakdown in terms of journals too, rather than just in terms of publishers? Researchers think in terms of journals. Sometimes they don't even know who the publisher is! Stevan Harnad On Wed, 5 Oct 2005, Tomas Lund?n wrote [in SOAF]: > Hi, > > I have actually done this just recently (Oct 3), based on the info > available in the Sherpa/RoMeo list. The figures are: > > No of publishers in total: 120. > No of publishers that allow archiving of postprints (blue/green): 83 (69,2%). > > Out of these 83: > Those who allow archiving of the publisher?s pdf: 53 (63,9%). > > Those who allow archiving of the author?s final refereed version: 31 (37,3%). > > (The reason that the figures add up to more than 100% is that one publisher > allows both versions, the published one with a 12 month embargo. One should > also note that most of the big commercial publishers belong to the second > category, author version.) > > Note: These figures have been generated from the perspective of > institutional repositories. That is, I only counted publishers who allow > posting in IR?s (as opposed to authors own web pages). > > I did make a "liberal" interpretation of the information in the RoMeo list. > If the info does not explicitly state that posting in IR?s is not allowed, > I interpret it as being allowed. > I also interpret it as, if the info does not explicitly state which version > to use, the publisher version is allowed. > > So you might get slightly different figures, depending on your perspective, > and how "liberal" your interpretation of the statements are. > > Best regards, > Tomas Lund?n, > Librarian, > Lund University Libraries, > Sweden. > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Brian Simboli > Date: Monday, October 3, 2005 10:21 pm > Subject: [SOAF] question about green policies > > > > > Have statistics been generated about how many journals or > > publishers allow > > the first as opposed to the second below? > > > > --rights for authors to put up the post-print of their article, > > defined as > > the final draft after it has been refereed, where this post-print > > is not > > identical to the publisher's own finalized version (the latter > > being the > > one actually published) > > > > --rights for authors to put up the publisher's *own* finalized > > version of > > an article (that is, the one that is actually published). > > > > Thanks > > Brian Simboli > > > > -- > > Brian Simboli > > Science Librarian > > Library & Technology Services > > E.W. Fairchild Martindale > > 8A East Packer Avenue > > Lehigh University > > Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170 > > (610) 758-5003 E-mail: brs4@lehigh.edu > > > > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Oct 7 19:28:27 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Article downloads lower? In-Reply-To: <200510072313.j97ND5Pm001835@quickgr.its.yale.edu> Message-ID: Fred, May I make a suggestion? You are giving altogether too much weight to the IOPP download datum, even as you express your reservations about it. Your message is: "Who says the reduced downloads were because of Arxiv? Maybe they happened for some other reason." But the trouble with that is that it implies that if the download reductions *were* systematically correlated with (hence caused by) Arxiv downloads, then that would somehow represent a problem, and would somehow constitute evidence for something else: But what else? Of course the availability of a self-archived version will reduce downloads of the journal version -- *especially* in physics, where there is a special "Arxiv Advantage" in citations, over and above the Open Access citation Advantage itself: Even articles in Open Access Journals (as the Journal of High Energy Physics was in its first 3 years), or articles in journals to which users may have institutional access, tend to be preferentially consulted online via Arxiv, just because so many other articles are consulted via Arxiv. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html What certainly does not follow from that is what ALPSP have been trying to argue, which is that this somehow constitutes evidence of present or future *cancellations* of IOPP journals. Please see Tim Brody's posting today on AmSci about the simple and obvious solution of pooling repository and publisher stats so as to properly credit all downloads to the journal in which the article was published, using OpenURL, so librarians don't come to the wrong conclusion from the incomplete publisher website download counts that the journal is no longer of use! No special pleading is needed to explain away or apologize for the reduce IOPP website downloads. They are most probably due to increased use of the Arxiv version. And IOPP have found the right remedy: They are mirroring Arxiv at the IOPP website. That way they can already start claiming credit for some of the many access-paths by which their content is being actively used (since Arxiv has about 15 mirrors!). Pooled stats will not be long coming too. Cheers, Stevan PS The reason IOPP are registering reduced download counts, 14 years down the road, rather than when Arxiv first started, is because download counting is more recent, and getting ever more accurate. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:13:05 EDT From: "FrederickFriend" Reply-To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu Subject: Article downloads lower? It would assist us all in understanding the effect of free repository content if publishers could make available their download statistics for articles for which a free repository copy exists. It may then be possible to compare the publisher statistics with the download statistics for the equivalent repository copy. I have no reason to doubt IOPP's statement (from Ken Lillywhite to Lis-e-journals on 5 September) that "article downloads from our site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially replicated in the arXiv repository than for those which are not", but with all due respect to IOPP the lower downloads could be due to factors other than the existence of an arXiv copy. Clearly download statistics do vary between journals even when no repository copy exists, and the time-line for downloads is also a significant factor. If public positions are to be based upon such statistics, as when publishers base resistance to repository deposit upon lower downloads from their own sites, we need to be sure that the statistical base is firm. The point is often made that we need more evidence of the effects of changes in scholarly communication, and JISC and other organizations have been gathering evidence. Making download statistics available for examination alongside download statistics from repositories would be one way in which publishers could work with the academic community in gathering evidence about the effect of repositories. Frederick J. Friend JISC Consultant OSI Open Access Advocate Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL E-mail ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Oct 12 07:19:07 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] University of Zurich: 4th Institution with Self-Archiving Mandate Message-ID: The University of Zurich has just registered its Institutional Self-Archiving Policy at: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ The 14th institution with a policy, Zurich is the 4th (after Southampton, Queensland University of Technology, and CERN) with a mandate rather than merely a recommendation. This is also the second mandate in a Swiss institution: "Based on the Berlin Declaration (Berlin, October 2003) http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html and the Berlin 3 Open Access recommendations (Southampton, March 2005) the University of Zurich has decided to 1. require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published and refereed articles in the Institutional Repository of the University of Zurich, if there are no legal objections 2. encourage and support their authors to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journals exists and provide the support to enable that to happen" [If I could make one suggestion to Prof. Borbely: Zurich's policy would be even more effective, and the optimal model for emulation, if it *required* deposit of the full-text and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication in all cases (no exceptions), and *recommended* that access to them be immediately set as open-access (if there are no legal objections); otherwise access can be provisionally set as institution-internal, and authors can email eprints of the full-text to any eprint-requesters who request them, based on the metadata visible webwide, alongside the metadata for all the articles with access already set as open-access.] Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Oct 12 13:07:04 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Public Clarification Needed: Does RCUK Have a Plan B? In-Reply-To: <00b801c5cf52$ffdc6930$0200000a@samsung> Message-ID: On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > Stevan, there's nothing to get indignant about! The RCUK policy always said > that deposit should be 'subject to copyright and licensing agreements'. We > merely sought clarification of that statement, which we obtained. But, dear Sally, whatever gave you the impression I was indignant about anything? I am quite happily working to try to help plug the loopholes of the RCUK policy, and Plan B will do so quite nicely, while staying quite literally consistent with the original draft, the letter of the law, the best interests of research and researchers and your own preferred outcome. So everyone should end up quite happy, both the research community and the publishing community. Best wishes, Stevan > > Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 19:02:35 +0100 > > From: Stevan Harnad > > Subject: Public Clarification Needed: Does RCUK Have a Plan B? > > > > Prior AmSci Topic Threads: > > > > "Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" > > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4308.html > > > > "Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding" > > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4313.html > > > > Is the ALPSP announcement (reproduced at the end of this message from > > Peter Suber's Open Access News) really true? Has ALPSP indeed been > > privately promised veto/embargo power over RCUK Policy? > > > > I very much hope the ALPSP announcement is not true, and that ALPSP is > > again vastly overstating its case, because otherwise it sounds as if RCUK > > has effectively agreed to make the RCUK policy conditional on whether and > > when each publisher agrees. If that were true it would mean that the RCUK > > self-archiving policy was even weaker than the deeply flawed NIH policy -- > > indeed, that the RCUK policy was no policy, mandate or requirement at all, > > but merely a pointer to each publisher's policy. > > > > The optimal RCUK policy would of course be: > > > > Plan A: to mandate *both* (1) depositing the full text and metadata > > immediately upon acceptance for publication *and* (2) setting > > full-text access as Open-Access immediately upon acceptance for > > publication. > > > > But if RCUK feels it cannot mandate that, the next best thing is > > certainly: > > > > Plan B: to mandate (1) depositing the full text and metadata > > immediately upon acceptance for publication and to also *strongly > > recommend* (2) setting full-text access as Open-Access immediately > > upon acceptance for publication. (In the case of the <10% of journals > > that have not yet given OA self-archiving their green light, full-text > > access can be set as Institution-Internal-Access, and external eprint > > requests to the author -- based on the immediate webwide visibility > > and accessibility of the OAI metadata -- can be made and filled by > > email for the time being.) > > > > Plan B would immediately remove the RCUK policy from the reach of > > the ALPSP lobby completely, because only deposit would be mandated, > > whereas OA access-setting would merely be recommended. Nothing else would > > then need to be stipulated at all in the RCUK policy -- about publisher > > policy, copyright or embargoes. > > > > To instead build into the RCUK policy a veto and embargo power at each > > publisher's discretion would be counterproductive in the extreme, not > > only for the RCUK policy's capacity to provide OA to British research > > output, but for its capacity to serve as a model for other nations that > > are closely watching what RCUK will do, and likely to emulate it. > > > > We need further public clarification on this from RCUK. Otherwise > > ALPSP's public claim below -- if uncontested by RCUK -- to having > > already received RCUK's agreement to publisher veto and embargo power > > over whether and when the full-text deposit is made will cause negative > > ripples worldwide through rumour alone, giving the impression that there > > is in fact no RCUK self-archiving policy at all, but simply a deferral > > to whatever policy each publisher may or may not happen to have on > > the matter. > > > > From Peter Suber's Open Access News > > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_10_02_fosblogarchive.html#a112869116319287317 > > > > ALPSP meeting with the RCUK > > > > On September 16, the ALPSP met with representatives of the RCUK to > > discuss publisher objections to the draft OA policy. The ALPSP has > > publicly disclosed this much about the results of the meeting: > > http://www.alpsp.org/news/rcuk.htm > > > > "We are reassured that RCUK have agreed to explain to grant recipients > > why publishers might find it necessary to impose an embargo or time > > limit for deposit of articles in order to protect subscription and > > licence sales, and also to insist that such embargoes must be observed; > > we have offered to help with drafting the wording for this. We are > > also pleased to know that RCUK will be consulting publishers over > > the specification of the research which will be conducted over > > the next two years, to evaluate the likely effects of the policy > > (although papers arising from research funded after the beginning > > of 2006 are unlikely to have been published by the review date of > > 2008); we hope that the research will be sufficiently objective to > > ensure that publishers do provide data about the effects, if any, > > on downloads, subscription/licence sales, and other measures of > > journal sustainability. RCUK plan to hold a workshop for societies > > in the early part of next year, and ALPSP has offered to help in any > > way that might be required." > > > > The ALPSP minutes of the meeting are available to members only. > > > > (Peter Suber: "It looks like the RCUK will not close the "copyright > > loophole" in the current draft, which allows publishers to impose > > embargoes. Instead, it may even let publishers re-word it to suit > > themselves.") > > > > Permanent link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 10/07/2005 > > 09:14:00 AM. > > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_10_02_fosblogarchive.html#a112869116319287317 > > > > ------------------------------ > > > > End of AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM Digest - 7 Oct 2005 to 8 Oct > > 2005 (#2005-185) > > ***************************************************************************************** > > > > ______________________________________________________________________ > > This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. > > For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email > > ______________________________________________________________________ > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Oct 13 07:36:06 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Effects of OA *publishing* on OA *publishing*: Peter/Paul Redux In-Reply-To: <016e01c5cfd1$07e80d90$0200000a@samsung> Message-ID: Re: New ALPSP study on the effects of Open Access on scholarly publishing "The facts about Open Access" http://www.alpsp.org/pubs.htm Prior Amsci Topic Thread: "Drubbing Peter to Pox Paul" (started November 2004) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4152.html and Guardian Eduation December 2004) http://education.guardian.co.uk/higherfeedback/story/0,11056,1364556,00.html Without prejudice as to the reliability and validity of the ALPSP study, I must point out (wearily, yet again) that this was *not* a study of "the effects of OA on scholarly publishing" nor of "the facts about Open Access". It was a study of *OA publishing* (i.e., of the journals that currently make their own contents freely available on the web, how they currently make ends meet, what their current quality levels are, and how they currently implement peer review). The main findings are that: (1) many current OA journals do not use the OA cost-recovery model, (2) some current OA journals are having trouble making ends meet, (3) some current OA journals may have lower quality standards. These findings have nothing *whatsoever* to do with OA self-archiving, nor with the proposed RCUK OA self-archiving mandate. They are about current OA publishing only. Touting them as being "The facts about Open Access" and as revealing "the effects of Open Access on scholarly publishing" is utter nonsense and very much in the spirit of ALPSP's rather strained efforts to give the impression that there is any objective evidence at all that OA self-archiving has a negative effect on journal publishing. There is and continues to be no such evidence, and this study provides no such evidence. The survey merely repeats the (well-known, well-aired) *opinion* of some publishers that "disastrous consequences" are imminent. Using the data on the current status of OA publishing as if it had any bearing at all on OA self-archiving is drubbing Peter (self-archiving) to pox Paul (OA publishing). This strategy may be sufficient to dupe DTI for a bit http://education.guardian.co.uk/higherfeedback/story/0,11056,1364556,00.html but sooner or later sensible people are bound to twig on the fact that it is nothing but a smoke-screen. I am quite confident that the RCUK consists of such sensible people. Stevan Harnad On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > Apologies for duplication, but I thought your members/readers of > all these lists would be interested in the message below > > Sally > > Sally Morris, Chief Executive > Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers > South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK > Tel: +44 (0)1903 871 686 > Fax: +44 (0)1903 871 457 > Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Nick Evans > To: alpsp-discuss@mailbase.ac.uk > Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 2:32 PM > Subject: New ALPSP study on the effects of Open Access on scholarly publishing > > I am pleased to let you know that the substantial research study > into the quickly evolving landscape of Open Access publishing has > been released by ALPSP today (Tuesday 11 October 2005). A free > to download pdf of the full report is available on our website > (www.alpsp.org) together with the Overview section (the first 32 > pages of the report) and a press release. The priced printed version > of the report (which is 128 pages long) can also be ordered online. > > As you will know this new study 'The Facts About Open Access' was > sponsored by ALPSP with the American Association for the Advancement > of Science (AAAS) and HighWire Press, with additional data from > the Association of American Medical Colleges. The research was > conducted by the independent consultants Kaufman-Wills Group LLC. > > It makes fascinating and instructive reading. As Sally says in > her introduction: "Discussion of Open Access tends to be strong > on rhetoric but short on facts. But now we have, for the first > time, a substantial body of data about different forms of Open > Access publishing, and a baseline of comparison with traditional > subscription publishing." > > Nick > > Nick Evans > Member Services Manager > Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) > 9 Stanbridge Road > Putney, London, SW15 1DX > Email: nick.evans@alpsp.org > Web: www.alpsp.org > Phone: +44 (0)20 8789 2394 From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Oct 13 12:53:55 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] British Academy comment on the draft RCUK policy Message-ID: Posted in Open Access News by Peter Suber at 10/13/2005 10:26:00 AM. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_10_09_fosblogarchive.html#a112921386371455883 The British Academy comment on the draft RCUK policy The British Academy has publicly released its August comment http://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/rcuk-2005/rcuk-html.html on the draft RCUK open-access policy. http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp (Thanks to Gerard Lowe.) Excerpt: "[1]...The British Academy responds as the UK national academy for the humanities and social sciences, as a funder of research (with both public and private funds), and as a learned society with its own publishing programme. [2] In April 2005 the Academy published a policy review document on E-resources for research in the humanities and social sciences, http://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/eresources/index.html which addresses the issues raised in the RCUK statement. The report supported "the principle of wide and ready access to research outputs and other research resources". In particular it stressed how important it was for the humanities and social sciences to engage with open access issues, so that the agenda was not over-dominated by the natural sciences. [3] The RCUK position statement appears to be driven primarily by considerations that relate to the natural sciences....In the humanities, the dissemination of scholarship is less dominated by journal articles and conference proceedings: monographs continue to play a key role. Scholarship can be less driven by the very latest published findings: articles published 30-50 years ago remain important.... [4]...The RCUK position implies that an alternative system will have to be devised and implemented. The statement acknowledges that new models will require new solutions, but provides little firm evidence in support of its optimism that these solutions will be found. There are doubts that need to be addressed. [5] The cost in money and time of establishing and maintaining institutional or other repositories should not be underestimated. The statement is vague about likely costs, where the funding will come from, and indeed whether this will be more cost-effective than the existing model....[W]ill there be adequate support for individual researchers seeking to deposit their material? And it is surely doubtful whether learned societies across the humanities and social sciences are equally willing or geared up to take on any '?kite marking' responsibilities -- at least without any reimbursement of the associated costs. [6] The statement is also vague about the costs associated with open access journals. A typical 'author-pays' fee of ?1500 might not constitute a significant addition to a typical research grant in the natural sciences, but it would form a significant percentage increase on the small individual grants that are common in the humanities and social sciences. Where is this additional funding to come from? Indeed much output in the humanities does not derive from research grant funding at all: is it likely that funds will be available just for fees? [7]...There is also the question as to whether institutional repositories are best suited to meet the needs of individual researchers, and whether parts, or even all, of the academic community might be better served by subject repositories.... [8] With such doubts about future models, one would expect that the existing publishing model should not be undermined in the meantime. The RCUK position accepts that articles should be deposited in e-print repositories 'subject to copyright and licensing arrangements', but makes clear its view that such restrictions should be as liberal as possible. The Academy is not surprised that some university presses are continuing to assert limitations to defend the value that they provide through the peer review process -- for example, imposing a delay in access.... [9] An equivalent requirement to deposit articles is not being imposed on British Academy research grants awarded in the academic year 2005/06 because the terms and conditions have already been set and publicly announced. The position will be kept under review, particularly in light of the availability of suitable repositories." Comment [from Peter Suber]: "Four quick replies. (1) On #4: The RCUK isn't seeking a solution yet to be found. It's funding a solution that it's already found. (2) On #5: The cost in time and money of maintaining institutional repositories should not be overestimated. Repositories not already funded are likely to be funded by JISC. Moreover, since the network of interoperable repositories will supplement, not supplant, "the existing model", the call for a comparison of their cost-effectiveness is misleading. (3) On #7: Nothing in the RCUK policy rules out subject repositories or the simultaneous deposit of RCUK-funded research in more than one repository. (4) On #8: We'll have to agree to disagree about whether RCUK should close the copyright loophole in the current draft. Since it allows publishers to impose embargoes of arbitrary length, the loophole effectively removes the teeth from the OA "mandate" and thereby puts publisher prosperity ahead of research productivity." Peter Suber's comments are on target with everything. I would add only that Plan B -- mandating immediate deposit upon acceptance for publication and attaching any further contingencies only to whether the access is set immediately at open access (OA) or provisionally only to institution-internal access (IA) -- would still be a mandate. Of course an immediate (or even 6-month) OA-setting mandate would be optimal, but an immediate-deposit mandate with the "loopholes" applying only to the access-setting would still leave the RCUK mandate a policy model worthy of emulation by the rest of the world. -- And it would still succeed in generating 100% open access with certainty and swiftness, worldwide. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Oct 13 15:04:43 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: ALPSP's Facts About OA Report In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > As far as the 'self-archiving' route to OA is concerned, I must have > explained our concern a hundred times; let me spell it out yet again: > > Let us assume that self-archiving mandates become widespread, and that > tools such as Google Scholar make self-archived articles as easy to > discover as the published versions. > > Then if free substitute versions are available for all or most of the > content of a given journal, and if these are used by library patrons in > preference to the published version, the rational librarian will not > purchase the published version But if, as all the studies to date show, library patrons use the library licensed published version for those articles that their libraries can afford, and use the author's self-archived OA version for those they cannot, what is Sally's and ALPSP's rationale for keeping them deprived of the articles their libraries cannot afford? and for keeping the authors of those articles deprived of that usage and impact? Is the rationale that the need to protect publishers' from any possibility of risk of a decline in subscription revenues (for which there does not yet exist even a single shred of evidence today ) takes precedence over all these author and user needs -- over all of these *research* needs? Nor do subscriptions and cancellations depend primarily on the "rational librarian": they depend on their user/author communities, who are not calling for cancellations, but for access to what their libraries cannot afford, and for the impact that their own articles lose, from users at other institutions whose libraries cannot afford the journal they were published in. > If subscriptions fall dramatically, journals will no longer be viable and > will cease publication Repeating this "a hundred times" and a hundred times more does not make it one whit more a statement of actual fact, rather than the counterfactual "if/then" conjecture that it is, and continues to be, with not a shred of evidence to support the "if." I advise Sally to attend the STM session in Frankfurt next week in which Michael Kurtz of astrophysics of Harvard will be presenting the data of Edwin Henneken on usage by astrophysicists, showing how they switch from using the preprint to using the publisher's published version as soon as it is available -- except those who cannot afford access, who continue to use the self-archived postprint. http://www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/messe/symposium2005/programme.html > If journals are no longer there to carry out their current functions (not > just the management of peer review, but also > selection/refinement/collection of content of particular relevance to a > given community of interest) that will be a great loss to scholarship So would every other negative if/then counterfactual that I or Sally or Pascal or anyone else could dream up, but that doesn't make their if-premises any truer either, not even after being repeated thousands of times. And the more use raise the hypothetical ante, the more ominous it sounds -- without becoming one bit truer. "Pascal's Wager and Open Access" http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/21-guid.html So let me say it straight out: All evidence is that what is in the best interests of the research community and what is in the best interests of the publisher community can co-exist peacefully with self-archiving. But if there ever were a conflict of interest, there is no doubt whatsoever about the direction in which it would have to be resolved: the dog (research production), not the tail (research publishing). > I do not argue that society or indeed other publishers have any right to > continue to perform their current function. I'm just pointing out that they > may be unable to do so if self-archiving sweeps the board as some would > like it to do. That is why we are urging caution to those who would > mandate immediate self-archiving. Self-archiving mandates are not for "sweeping the board," they are for providing access to those researchers who *actually* can't afford it today, and thereby providing their lost impact to the research and researchers that are actually losing it today. The sweepingly overboard statements about counterfactual disaster scenarios, in contrast, are coming from those who are trying to protect actual, unchanged publisher revenue streams from counterfactual, hypothetical risk, at the cost of certain and sizeable benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the public that funds their research -- i.e., the canid rather than its queue. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Oct 13 15:21:01 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Effects of OA *publishing* on OA *publishing*: Peter/Paul Redux In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Don Odom wrote: > Dear Stevan, > Why not just say simply that OA _archiving_ is not the same as OA _publishing_? That distinction has been there ever since the word "Open Access" was coined: say the BOAI definition of BOAI-1 (OA self-archiving) and BOAI-2 (OA journal-publishing). http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml Best not to leave out the "self" because it is critical that the author is archiving his *own* published journal articles, rather than the publisher doing it for him (OA publishing). Both require online "archiving," but only in self-archiving does the author do it -- as a supplement to publishing in a journal, not a substitute for it. (Also, stand-alone "archiving" is often misinterpreted as a preservation function rather than the immediate access-provision function OA self-archiving is meant to be.) > The critical difference here in my mind that with OA archiving one archives > for _oneself_ while with OA publishing one publishes for _others_. Correct. > With the former no intention exists to capture the costs of anything - the > preparation, the peer review, the posting, etc. Correct. Nor to derive any revenue from it: The publisher continues to be the one who performs the service and receives the revenue for it. The author simply supplements the toll access with free access to his own version for would-be users who cannot afford the toll version. > With the latter, there is > the clear intent to capture the costs either on the front end (from the > authors) or the back end (from the subscribers). Correct. > Perhaps by presenting this difference in lowest common denominator terms the > message might sink in?! Ah dear Don, if you only knew how often it *has* been presented in those very |lowest common denominator terms" yet it continues to be misunderstood -- unwittingly by most, wilfully by some... The fact that this distinction is striking you, in October 2005, as if it were somehow a new revelation (rather than something that has been said over and over and over again for years now) is a symptom of how hard it has been to get this monumentally trivial and transparent point across. It will require future psycho-historians to diagnose why it took so very long for the token to drop... Chrs, Stevan > Best, Don > ---------------------------------- > Karlstads universitet > Avd. utbildning och forskning > Universitetsgatan 2 > 651 88 Karlstad > Tel. +46 54 710 1000 (switchboard) > http://www.kau.se/ > ---------------------------------- > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Stevan Harnad > To: American Scientist Open Access Forum > > Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:36:06 +0100 (BST) > Subject: [BOAI] Effects of OA *publishing* on OA *publishing*: Peter/Paul > Redux > > > Re: New ALPSP study on the effects of Open Access on scholarly > > publishing > > "The facts about Open Access" > > http://www.alpsp.org/pubs.htm > > > > Prior Amsci Topic Thread: > > "Drubbing Peter to Pox Paul" (started November 2004) > > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4152.html > > and Guardian Education December 2004) > > > > http://education.guardian.co.uk/higherfeedback/story/0,11056,1364556,00 > > .html > > > > Without prejudice as to the reliability and validity of the ALPSP > > study, > > I must point out (wearily, yet again) that this was *not* a study of > > "the > > effects of OA on scholarly publishing" nor of "the facts about Open > > Access". > > > > It was a study of *OA publishing* (i.e., of the journals that currently > > make their own contents freely available on the web, how they currently > > make ends meet, what their current quality levels are, and how they > > currently implement peer review). The main findings are that: (1) > > many current OA journals do not use the OA cost-recovery model, (2) > > some current OA journals are having trouble making ends meet, (3) some > > current OA journals may have lower quality standards. > > > > These findings have nothing *whatsoever* to do with OA self-archiving, > > nor with the proposed RCUK OA self-archiving mandate. They are about > > current OA publishing only. > > > > Touting them as being "The facts about Open Access" and as revealing > > "the effects of Open Access on scholarly publishing" is utter nonsense > > and very much in the spirit of ALPSP's rather strained efforts to give > > the impression that there is any objective evidence at all that OA > > self-archiving has a negative effect on journal publishing. There is > > and continues to be no such evidence, and this study provides no such > > evidence. The survey merely repeats the (well-known, well-aired) > > *opinion* > > of some publishers that "disastrous consequences" are imminent. > > > > Using the data on the current status of OA publishing as if it had any > > bearing at all on OA self-archiving is drubbing Peter (self-archiving) > > to pox Paul (OA publishing). This strategy may be sufficient to dupe > > DTI for a bit > > > > > > http://education.guardian.co.uk/higherfeedback/story/0,11056,1364556,00 > > .html > > > > but sooner or later sensible people are bound to twig on the fact that > > it is nothing but a smoke-screen. > > > > I am quite confident that the RCUK consists of such sensible people. > > > > Stevan Harnad > > > > On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > > > > > Apologies for duplication, but I thought your members/readers of > > > all these lists would be interested in the message below > > > > > > Sally > > > > > > Sally Morris, Chief Executive > > > Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers > > > South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK > > > Tel: +44 (0)1903 871 686 > > > Fax: +44 (0)1903 871 457 > > > Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > From: Nick Evans > > > To: alpsp-discuss@mailbase.ac.uk > > > Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 2:32 PM > > > Subject: New ALPSP study on the effects of Open Access on scholarly > > publishing > > > > > > I am pleased to let you know that the substantial research study > > > into the quickly evolving landscape of Open Access publishing has > > > been released by ALPSP today (Tuesday 11 October 2005). A free > > > to download pdf of the full report is available on our website > > > (www.alpsp.org) together with the Overview section (the first 32 > > > pages of the report) and a press release. The priced printed version > > > of the report (which is 128 pages long) can also be ordered online. > > > > > > As you will know this new study 'The Facts About Open Access' was > > > sponsored by ALPSP with the American Association for the Advancement > > > of Science (AAAS) and HighWire Press, with additional data from > > > the Association of American Medical Colleges. The research was > > > conducted by the independent consultants Kaufman-Wills Group LLC. > > > > > > It makes fascinating and instructive reading. As Sally says in > > > her introduction: "Discussion of Open Access tends to be strong > > > on rhetoric but short on facts. But now we have, for the first > > > time, a substantial body of data about different forms of Open > > > Access publishing, and a baseline of comparison with traditional > > > subscription publishing." > > > > > > Nick > > > > > > Nick Evans > > > Member Services Manager > > > Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) > > > 9 Stanbridge Road > > > Putney, London, SW15 1DX > > > Email: nick.evans@alpsp.org > > > Web: www.alpsp.org > > > Phone: +44 (0)20 8789 2394 > > > > > > > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Oct 13 20:20:54 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Please Register your Institutional Repositories and Policies Message-ID: ** Apologies for Cross-Posting ** Dear All: If you have an institutional repository, please register it at: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=add Then the growth of your archive will be automatically monitored and available for comparative statistics. (See the various displays avaliable in the Registry.) And everyone will have a clear idea of how the number of IRs as well as the number of items in them is growing. And if your institution has an official self-archiving policy, please register it at: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/sign.php Then other institutions can follow your example. Many thanks, Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Oct 15 14:58:55 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Publish OA if you can - self-archive either way In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Re: Publish OA if you can - self-archive if you can't On Sat, 15 Oct 2005, Jan Velterop wrote: > Evidence, evidence. > > What I am interested in, and working on, is a sustainable way of > providing open access, because open access is here to stay. Mandated > or not. For the simple reason that it is beneficial and possible with > the technology at our disposal. No evidence, just judgement. The > question is not "why open access?" -- the question is "why not?" Jan, that's been the question for at least 10 years now. http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct04/poynder.shtml The answer is that although (e.g.) 34,000 biologists are ready to do the keystrokes to demand OA from their publishers (by becoming OA [gold] publishers), they are not ready to do the keystrokes to provide OA for themselves (by self-archiving). Publishers, in turn, have not been ready to respond to the demand for OA by becoming gold -- though many of them (including Springer) have been willing to go green (and in Springer's case, also to offer gold as an option). So if you want to know the answer to "why not [OA, now]?" it is that researchers want OA enough to demand and wait for it to be provided, but not enough to provide it (only 15% do that). Publishers are even less willing: Under 10% are gold or part-gold (like Springer) though over 90% of their journals are green. And if OA must wait upon publishers to provide it, it's still got a long, long wait, as researcher demands (in the face of researcher passivity) have fallen flat, and publishers cannot be mandated to provide OA. But researchers *can* be mandated (by their funders and employers) to provide OA. Which is why the green route to 100% OA is the swiftest and surest one -- if the mandates (like Wellcome's and RCUK's) are forthcoming. > It is up to publishers to think of imaginative solutions if they wish to > survive. Those solutions are neither brought about by believing > 'evidence' that there is nothing to fear, nor by believing that there > are no alternatives to subscription-based publishing. For the moment, the only use to which (some -- not all) publishers are putting the nonexistent evidence (that self-archiving causes cancellations) plus their own, evidence-free worries about it, is to try to fend off self-archiving mandates for as long as possible. The question is: Are you, Jan, interested in (1) making common cause with the publishers who are trying to fend off self-archiving mandates on the grounds of the worries, with no evidence to support them, or are you interesting in (2) encouraging self-archiving mandates, for the sake of reaching 100% OA as soon as possible (after all these years)? (A specific answer would be very helpful!) > I'm getting ever so slightly tired of all the 'evidence' that's > floating around. In a rather fatamorganic way. There is no 'evidence' > worthy of the name. On either side. What there is is conjecture, > perception, hypothesis, opinion, judgement, fear, and hope. I am interested in getting a better sense of this fatamorganic logic: Would you say that when one replied to those who were trying to fend off the fluoridation of drinking water (14 years after fluoridation had already been going on) that "all the evidence to date is that fluoridation does not have any negative effects on health" -- that "there is no 'evidence' worthy of the name on either side, just conjecture, perception, hypothesis, opinion, judgement, fear, and hope." Absence of a correlation *is* evidence, not lack of evidence. Statistically speaking, the "null hypothesis" here is that self-archiving has no effect on cancellations, and 14 years of data from APS and IOPP in physics confirms it. Nor does it do to reply that, after all, self-archiving is now only at 15%, whereas mandates would drive it to 100%, for some of those physics fields have been at 100% self-archiving for a number of years now. > That's not necessarily a problem. What we need is persuasion. > Evidence might help, if we had it, but persuasion rests on > plausibility, not on truth-seeking per se. We have the evidence (no correlation). And we are trying to persuade -- e.g. the RCUK -- to go ahead and mandate self-archiving, while some publisher lobbies, such as the ALPSP, are trying to persuade RCUK *not* to mandate self-archiving, based on no evidence. Now the question comes: Which side are you on, Jan? *For* RCUK mandating self-archiving, or against it? > Nietsche noted that there are more people passionate about the way > than about the goal. Some of the recent discussion on this blog > supports that observation. But I would like to make a case for > refocusing on the goal: open access. What happened to the excellent > adage "publish with open access if there is an appropriate journal in > which you can -- self-archive if there isn't"? It is the unified policy that self-archiving advocates all support. The critical point, though, is that the first component, "publish with open access if there is an appropriate journal in which you can" is a conditional "if" (and in over 90% of cases, the answer is that there is none), and moreover it can only be recommended, not mandated. The second component can be mandated. So if the goal is 100% OA at last, it is very clear where most of the persuasion is needed: The persuasion to mandate (so the mandate can induce the self-archiving, which delivers the 100% OA). > As for Stevan's assertion that his chosen way, self-archiving, can be > mandated and the way of OA publishing not. Perhaps. But the more > meaningful mandate is to require researchers to assure the goal: open > access. I can only repeat: Researchers can do three things for OA: (1) Researchers can demand that their publishers provide OA, sign petitions for it, threaten not to publish in, referee for or use journals that do not provide it (as 34,000 biologists did in 2001, to no avail). (2) Researchers can wait for publishers to provide OA of their own accord (meanwhile publishing, where/when they can, in the few journals that offer it). (3) Researchers can provide OA to their own articles, by self-archiving them. Since none of these things that researchers *can* do has so far been sufficient to generate more than 15-25% OA, a funder/employer mandate can be a great help at this time. Do you support this, Jan? > "Publish with open access if there is an appropriate journal in which > you can -- self-archive if there isn't". This encourages publishers > and societies to start publishing with open access and it doesn't > undermine Stevan's cherished self-archiving. But Jan, the above is merely a statement, and one that most researchers are aware of by now --- and it is not enough to generate more than 15-25% OA on its own. Mandating my "cherished self-archiving" will. So, are you for mandating it or not? (You seem here to be for fending it off, joining those who try to fend off the 14 years' evidence of no correlation is "fatamorganic"...) Cheers, Stevan PS I'd say: Publish OA if you can - self-archive either way > Jan Velterop > > > On 14 Oct 2005, at 22:18, Stevan Harnad wrote: > > >On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Jan Velterop wrote: > > > > > The best defence against the dangers of self-archiving is pro- actively > > > offering open access publishing. OA publishing is completely > > > compatible with self-archiving, mandatory or voluntary. > > > >It seems the only ones who keep talking about the "dangers" of > >self-archiving are publishers, whether OA or non-OA -- and ever > >without > >a shred of evidence. > > > >Speaking instead for the research community: what we need "defence" > >against is not a hypothetical danger, with no objective evidence for > >its effects. We need defence against an actual loss of research > >impact, > >with unrelenting daily, monthly, yearly evidence of its effects. We > >need > >immediate defence against daily access-denial and the resulting daily > >impact-denial, which amounts to 50%-250%+ of our total potential > >impact. > > > >And mandated self-archiving (along with publish-or-perish) provides > >that immediate defence against daily access denial and impact loss. No > >contingency whatsoever on OA publishing, and certainly no need to wait > >for "pro-active" OA publishing (welcome though it would be, but which, > >unlike self-archiving, cannot be mandated)... > > > >On all existing evidence, both OA and non-OA publishing are completely > >compatible with self-archiving. > > > >Stevan Harnad > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sun Oct 16 14:23:43 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Do PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright Licence? In-Reply-To: <20051016200546.D28112@galileo.math.unipd.it> Message-ID: As Roger Clarke's email form letter to Repository Managers is being circulated quite widely, I would accordingly like to make these comments and suggestions publicly: (1) For the unrefereed, unpublished preprint, it is a good idea to do as Roger recommends: to adopt some form of provisional Creative Commons License rather than just putting it "nakedly" on the Web when self-archiving it. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ (2) This does not apply, however,, to the final, refereed, accepted, published draft (the postprint), which is published in a journal, which will have its own copyright transfer agreement, signed with the publisher, and which is the primary target of the Open Access movement. "Apercus of WOS Meeting: Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3798.html Now some comments: On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Antonella De Robbio wrote: > Dear Stevan > > I received this mail below from Roger Clarke, a Visiting Professor in Info > Science & Eng Australian National University, Visiting Professor in the > eCommerce Program, University of Hong Kong and also Visiting Professor in > the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre Uni of NSW. > I haven't yet reply to him because I have been away and precisely I have > been as Italian delegate at UNESCO 33.rd general conference where we have > presented an Open Access resolution as Italian UNESCO Commission. > Well, I am leaving for Geneva at OAI4 next days where I will organise the > first E-LIS conference too, at the end of OAI4 event. > I think we must reply to this professor, and so I thought you are the best > OAIperson who can do it. > I will answer to him too, later, when I will come back to my conferences > in Geneva. > Please look at this letter, he refers to some his articles on FirstMOnday > and others.. > > If you reply please put me in cc, so we could be coordinate in our > actions. My replies appear below: > Thank you! > Antonella De Robbio > E-LIS manager > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Roger Clarke > To: eprints@dois.it > Subject: PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright > Licence > > Dear ePrint Repository Manager > > The OA/ePrints/Repository movement is very important, and developing very well. > > But there's a gap in the strategy. > > When an ePrint is downloaded, it's likely that an implicit copyright > licence comes into existence. There's a lack of clarity about the > terms that courts might infer to be in such a licence. And that's > dangerous. It's not *terribly* dangerous, and courts have not much to do with it: Physicists and computer scientists have been posting "naked" papers online for over a decade and a half (hundreds of thousands of papers) with no problems. But for the unpublished, unrefereed, not-yet-copyright-protected preprints, it is a good idea to adopt one of the Copyright Commons Licenses to protect it until the final postprint is ready, accepted by the journal, and thenceforward covered by the journal's copyright agreement. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ It is somewhat misleading, though, to say that "eprints," generically, need a separate license: The preprints do, the postprints do not. > In a paper published in First Monday in August 2005, I analysed the > requirements for a copyright licence for Pre-Prints. I took care to > balance the interests of authors, journal-publishers, and the reading > public. Details of the paper are below. I have read the paper, and most of it is not pertinent to published postprints. > In a further short paper, I've now extended that analysis to address > Post-Prints as well. Details of that paper are also below. > > I'd like to submit a recommendation to the 'peak body' of ePrint > Repository Managers; but I haven't been able to find such an > association. > > So I'm approaching each ePrint Repository Manager directly, with the > following suggestions: > - recommend to authors that they make this licence-type available > for all PrePrints and PostPrints; Recommendations for naked preprints are welcome, but the postprints are already covered by publisher copyright. > - provide guidance and support to authors to enable them to do so > with a minimum of effort; and The guidance should clearly state that this is only pertinent to the unpublished preprint. > - consider making the availability of this licence-type a default > for all papers placed in repositories. As the primary target to Open Access Institutional Repositories is not unrefereed preprints but published postprints, the license should certainly not be incorporated as a default option. It will only create confusion in the case of the postprint, with the agreement already signed with the publisher. > THE ANALYSIS RE PRE-PRINTS: > Clarke R. (2005) 'A Proposal for an Open Content Licence for > Research Paper (Pr)ePrints' First Monday 10, 8 (August 2005), at > http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/clarke/index.html > > The Post-Print of the paper is at: > http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/PrePrLic.html > The Pre-Print of the paper (of 1 May 2005) is at: > http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/PrePrLic050501.html > > THE ANALYSIS RE POST-PRINTS: > Clarke R. (2005) 'A Standard Copyright Licence for PostPrints' > Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 26 August 2005, at > http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/PostPrLic.html > > THE RECOMMENDED LICENCE-TYPE IS: > Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 > US - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ > and its equivalents, e.g. > UK - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/ > FR - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/fr/ > AU - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.1/au/ These CC licenses are not applicable to articles that are already under a publisher's copyright agreement. Nor should anyone imply -- at a time when self-archiving of postprints is still only at 15%, even though 70% of journals already endorse postprint self-archiving, and 23% more endorse preprint self-archiving -- that the postprint author need do anything more than self-archive his postprint. Authors don't need more burdens, nor more worries (they are already needlessly worried about whether they may self-archive at all). Nor should they be advised (incorrectly) that in order to self-archive their postprints, they need to negotiate a different copyright agreement with their publishers. Nor should copyright licenses be applied to their preprints that might contradict the copyright agreement that they will be signing for their postprints. In general, copyright is a red herring for Open Access. Yes, make sure your text is copyright-protected while it's a preprint, but the postprint has no more copyright problem if it is self-archived than it used to have when it was not. That is what the copyright agreement with the publisher is for. See the eprint self-archiving FAQ items on copyright: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/ Stevan Harnad > Other national licences are at: > http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/ > > -- > Roger Clarke http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/ > > Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA > Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916 > mailto:Roger.Clarke@xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/ > > Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng Australian National University > Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program University of Hong Kong > Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre Uni of NSW > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sun Oct 16 16:27:27 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Publish OA if you can - self-archive either way In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Jan Velterop wrote: > Dear Stevan, > > Facts, yes. Evidence, however, constitutes facts in support of a > conclusion. The facts presented do perhaps support, but not the conclusions > bandied about. Neither your conclusions that self-archiving doesn't harm > journals *Hasn't* harmed journals to date (after 14 years). That's what the *evidence* is (or isn't). The rest is predictions and speculations. > and that OA publishing threatens to slow the adoption of OA, Who on earth said that? What I said (and say again) is that equating OA exclusively or even primarily with OA publishing slows the provision of OA. > nor Sally's conclusion that OA publishing is not economically viable, are > supported by facts. The facts presented only support the conclusion that so > far self-archiving has not materially harmed journals in physics and that > new OA journals are not likely to be profitable in record time. With that I agree. (Compare carefully with how you phrased this in the passages above, with which I cannot agree.) > No predictive quality, just retrospective. One has to be careful to regard > facts as predictive evidence. When Louis XVI of France concluded that the > French people were incapable of killing their king, he saw the fact that > they had never before killed their king as evidence. The facts in the > basket below the guillotine strongly supported the alternative conclusion. > (Puts "content is king" in perspective, doesn't it?). We are not talking here about a one-off event like killing or not killing a king. (This sort of argument, when used in philosophy of science courses, is usually used as a basis for Humean scepticism about the justifiability of making any predictions at all based on evidence to date, because the evidence can always prove wrong, as when the chicken -- who thinks, on the basis of all evidence to date, that there will always be a tomorrow for her -- makes her fatally fallacious extrapolation.) But I assume Jan is not trying to make a (self-defeating) Humean argument here against all evidence-based inferences and extrapolations. And a negative effect on subscriptions is not a sudden, all-or-none, one-off thing, like a beheading. We have had 14 years of continuous evidence that there is no correlation between self-archiving and subscription decline. Things might change, of course; but things might change with respect to countless other patterns we take to be established until there is evidence to the contrary. > Another fact. Some ALPSP societies fear that their journals will be harmed > by self-archiving mandates. Their fear is not irrational if one accepts > that there are laws and patterns in economics. If 14 years of self-archiving (in some physics areas reaching 100% OA a number of years ago) have not confirmed those "laws and patterns in economics," then I would conclude that those laws may not be laws after all (or not pertinent to the anomalous case of the research literature, written by its authors only for research impact, not royalty revenue, and given away (sic) to publishers and reprint-requesters alike). And the only "pattern" here so far is the observed empirical pattern of no correlation. > But even if their fear were > irrational, I always understood that psychologists are generally of the > view that bombarding sufferers with facts is not a good way of dealing with > their fears. Especially not if those facts can easily and rationally be > dismissed as irrelevant. Easily, yes; but rationally? I thought the premise here was "even if their fear were irrational"... > Therefore, it is important to persuade those > societies that there are ways of regaining control and so allaying their > fears. For you, Jan, the objective may be to allay publishers' fears, even if irrational. I have my hands full with the irrationality of researchers, who are so slow to do what is in their *own* best interests (and partly out of irrational fear of publishers!)... > By offering authors the choice of publishing with OA, for instance. Commendable, and desirable. But far, far too slow. And cannot be accelerated to 100% by a mandate -- whereas OA self-archiving can. > And by persuading funders that mandating OA can be done when regarding > publishing as a part of research -- not apart from it -- and thus regarding > the cost of publishing as integral to the cost of doing research (the > Wellcome Trust has taken a truly leading stance in this regard). Wellcome has mandated *OA self-archiving*, not OA publishing. It cannot mandate OA publishing. No one but the publisher (or the publisher's subsidiser, if any) can mandate that. > You don't answer the question 'why not OA'. Just repeating the fact that we > don't have widespread OA yet and that it has been the question for the last > 10 years, is not answering why. The primary reason we don't have 100% OA is because only 15% of authors are self-archiving, even though 100% could. A secondary reason is that only about 7% are publishing in OA journals, but that is because only about 7% of journals are OA journals. And the solution is to mandate OA self-archiving, which will generate 100% OA. And then there will no longer the question "Why not OA?" because 100% OA will be there. > Let me attempt an answer. In my view it's a > combination of -- but not limited to -- the following: > > 1. There is little to suggest that the ego-system we call Academia works > logically or rationally (would the impact factor be invested with the power > it has, for instance, if Academia did?); Publication bean-counting in the pure publish-or-perish days was an extremely weak 1st approximation to the measuring and rewarding of research productivity and impact. Then came journal impact factors, a slightly better approximation. Now we are in the era of measuring and rewarding authors' own citation impact, not just the average citation impact of the journals they publish in. What is irrational is to be rewarding citations while not maximizing them! But I still have some faith that the facts -- about OA's power to increase citation impact -- will prevail, if not soon enough with researchers themselves, then with their rewarders -- their institutions and funders, the ones in a position to mandate that they maximise their citation impacts, by self-archiving. > 2. There are not enough journals yet that offer OA publishing, especially > not enough with an impact factor; We agree on that, but there are two ways to go: Try to increase the number of OA journals, or try to increase the number of articles self-archived. With increasing the number of OA journals, you are up against publishers, who have all kinds of fears, and whose main allegiance is not to research impact but to protecting their revenue streams from risk. With self-archiving, you are up against researchers, who also have irrational fears, but whose main allegiance *is* their research impact. And they can be mandated by their own employers and funders to maximise the very thing they are already being rewarded for: their research impact (by self-archiving). > 3. The practice of incorporating the cost of publishing into the cost of > doing research is not yet widespread enough; That's because most publishers are still interested in recovering their costs the way most of them do now. That's why 93% of them are non-OA publishers. I commend your efforts to try to entice them by getting research funders to agree to cover OA publishing costs, but I don't for a microsecond believe that that's going to bring us much closer to 100% OA, whereas OA self-archiving can, and will, once mandated. > 4. Where the practice exists, it is not always made clear enough to > researchers; Don't be surprised that researchers (even if they purport to desire OA) are sluggish in doing what is in their own best interests. They don't self-archive nearly enough; they don't even publish in OA journals (when they can) nearly enough. > 5. There are not enough repositories for self-archiving; We can always use more repositories, but it is *certain* that that is not the real problem, because the many repositories we *do* have are nearly empty! What's missing is the self-archiving mandate (to fill them). > 6. Where there are, researchers are not always convinced that self- > archiving doesn't harm journals (after all, many of them also accept that > there are laws in economics); I highly doubt that the lion's share of the 85% self-archiving that is *not* being done today is not being done because researchers, like publishers, are worrying about the fate of their journals! Most self-archiving is not being done because of pure inertia: researchers are sluggish, set in their ways, already have more than enough to do, and (as they have *told* us, in the Swan & Brown surveys) they won't self-archive till their employers and/or funders mandate it -- but then 95% of them will do it, 14% grumblingly, 81% willingly. And the five institutions that already have self-archiving mandates (CERN, Southampton, Minho, QUT, and soon Zurich) are demonstrating that mandates work, as the surveys indicated. Let us not forget that "publish or perish" is itself a mandate, without which the sluggish researchers would not be giving the bean-counters *any* beans to count... > 7. Last but not least: OA advocates have lost their united approach which > was so wonderfully captured in "Publish with OA if you can - self-archive > if you can't". The unity was never there: I was the only one who kept flashing that unified message (in AmSci) from 2001-2003, while you and just about everyone else except Peter Suber were conducting a unilateral "gold rush" in which OA was equated exclusively with OA publishing and the only mention of archiving was as a form of storage of OA journal content! (Have a look at the Bethesda Statement and the original Berlin Declaration.) But the unified approach is still there: See the latest Berlin Declaration: http://www.eprints.org/events/berlin3/outcomes.html The only difference is that the unified statement (and the right one) is "Publish OA whenever you can -- but self-archive either way"... > You asked me some specific questions: > > >Are you, Jan, interested in (1) making common cause with the > >publishers who are trying to fend off self-archiving mandates on > >the grounds > >of the worries, with no evidence to support them, or are you > >interesting in > >(2) encouraging self-archiving mandates, for the sake of reaching > >100% OA as soon > >as possible (after all these years)? > > I hope you will allow me to ignore the bush-ite nature of this binary > question ("if you're not for me you must be against me"), and answer it > with the option you don't give me, option (3): I am in favour of mandating > OA, by publishing with OA where possible and self-archiving where it isn't. Since mandating OA publishing is not an option, a straightforward, unhedged way of putting it is the way the last Berlin Declaration meeting put it: "In order to implement the Berlin Declaration institutions should implement a policy to: 1. require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository and 2. encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists (and provide the support to enable that to happen)." Notice that it is necessarily the self-archiving (only) that is being *mandated*, whereas the OA publishing is being encouraged (and supported). > Your second question: > > >Which side are you on, Jan? *For* RCUK mandating > >self-archiving, or against it? > > Is already answered, but for the sake of avoidance of any doubt: I am in > favour of RCUK mandating that their grantees provide OA, by publishing with > OA where possible and self-archiving where it isn't. Although it's a bit fuzzy on what is (and can be) mandated and what cannot, and although there needs to be self-archiving in *both* cases (when publishing in either the 7% OA journals or the 93% non-OA journals), that's close enough. I'll remind you, though, the next time you say something that seems to contradict this apparent commitment: "The best defense against the dangers [sic] of self-archiving is pro-actively offering open access publishing." I assume you would not take my commitment to OA publishing very seriously if I said "The best defense against the dangers [sic] of OA publishing is OA self-archiving"... Chrs, Stevan From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Oct 17 18:11:50 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving In-Reply-To: <27b30c440510171601q5103cc46h84307b8abeaa5a8c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Alain Koyama wrote: > Hello - I was wondering how long does it normally take for an item to > be deposited? Thank you. See: Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ and Authors' perspectives on open access: effective ways to achieve OA Alma P Swan, Director of Key Perspectives Ltd http://openaccess.eprints.org/beijing/pdfs/Swan_6-2.pdf Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Oct 18 06:23:19 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: CIBER 2005: The foxes survey the chicken-coop In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Velterop, Jan Springer UK wrote: > Interesting new (to me) survey: > www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/papers/dni-20050925.pdf One at first wonders why Jan Velterop would recommend a survey asking disinterested questions of the form: Question 10 Consider this statement: 'A major shift to open access publishing would undermine the current scholarly journals system' Question 10a To what extent do you think this is likely to happen? Very unlikely / Quite unlikely / Neither likely nor unlikely / Quite likely / Very unlikely / I don't know Question 10b To what extent do you think this would be a good thing or a bad thing? Very bad / Quite bad / Neither good nor bad / Quite good / Very good / I don't know But as one reads further one finds the kind of question that probably piqued Jan's own interests: Question 16 Consider the statement: 'A major shift to archiving published articles in institutional repositories would undermine the current scholarly journals system' Question 16a To what extent do you think this is likely to happen? Very unlikely / Quite unlikely / Neither likely nor unlikely / Quite likely / Very unlikely / I don't know Question 16b To what extent do you think this would be a good thing or a bad thing? Very bad / Quite bad / Neither good nor bad / Quite good / Very good / I don't know and Question 15 Are you happy that, under an institutional repository model, readers would be able to retrieve several different versions of your articles? (for example, the 'official' version of your paper on the publisher's website, together with one or more pre-publication versions on public web sites)? Very happy / Quite happy / Not very happy / Not at all happy / I don't know Nolo contendere. I prefer surveys that do not plant words or thoughts into the surveyee's mouths/minds... Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Oct 18 07:39:57 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Do PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright Licence? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote: > > http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/ > > I will point out the incorrect information in your FAQ. > > It is simply wrong to state that the copyright transfer agreement > does not apply to preprint when the agreement is not made at the > time of preprint. You made a wrong assumption that the copyright > that is transferred according to the agreement is different from > the copyright that exists in preprint. When you transfer copyright > in your work to someone else, the copyright covers all the copies > of the work. That includes preprint. Note that the author can > retain a copy at his website. He simply no longer has the right > to create more copies and to distribute more copies unless he > has the permission from the copyright holder that holds copyright > in his work. There is just one fundamental oversight on your part here, and the rest of the disagreement derives from that one oversight: The online medium is *different*. "Copy* as in "copyright" no longer has its prior straightforward meaning, and cannot. If you leave the preprint on the website, everything else comes with the territory: accessing it, reading it on-screen, downloading it, storing it, doing computations on it, printing it off (own local use, not distribution), linking to it, citing it. That's all that's needed for OA; that's all that's claimed. The preprint and the preprint self-archiving pre-date the submission, the revision, the acceptance and any subsequent copyright transfer. Regardless of whether the preprint is regarded as covered by the later copyright, or the postprint is regarded as a derivative work, the cat's out of the bag, irretrievably. The preprint, perfectly legally, is already online and accessible to all, and continues to be, because, in fact, there's no real way to remove something from the web once it has been made publicly accessible and has propagated forever to mirrors and caches and harvests and distributed downloads and wayback machines. That too comes with the territory. And that's the concrete, practical part. The rest is just formalistic pedantry (based mostly on moot paper-based notions), with no practical import online -- or on legalistic superstition, with likewise no practical import online. > Another wrong information that you continue to give is related > to corrigenda. Corrigenda alone is not illegal from the perspective > of copyright law. However, it is simply illegal to combine preprint > and corrigenda to create a text that is totally identical to postprint > whose copyright is owned by copyright holder unless you are > permitted to do so. The reason is simply that the copyright holder > holds copyright in postprint (and preprint). You continue to > give the wrong information that it is legal to combine preprint > and corrigenda. With all due respect, I think that that is exactly the sort of formalism that has no concrete practical content whatever. If I write a text, post it publicly on the web, submit it for publication, revise it in accordance with the recommendations of the referees and then the text is accepted for publication and copyright is transfered to the publisher (a) there is no way to get the preprint off the web and (b) it is utter nonsense to say that I cannot post and link a list of corrigenda to the preprint. Of course I can. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Oct 18 09:13:20 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: CIBER 2005: The foxes survey the chicken-coop In-Reply-To: <1A3FF4C9782A1249BDFC2FF2B5749C980AAA4FD8@EXEVS01.its.uncc.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 Jan Velterop wrote: > Thanks for analysing the survey. I hadn't read it yet and just seen > a few slides in which it was mentioned. I only recommend looking at > it. Not necessarily agreeing with its conclusion. You think that I should? http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/papers/dni-20050925.pdf I haven't looked at the CIBER survey in great detail, but I would say that the parts of its outcome that are relatively unbiassed by the way the questions were put provide a diluted and somewhat dated confirmation of the outcome of the far more neutral, focused and reliable JISC surveys. Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2004) Report of the JISC/OSI journal authors survey. pp 1-76. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Open Access Self-Archiving: An Author Study (Sponsored by JISC) http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/reports/Open%20Access%20II%20(author%20survey%20on%20self%20archiving)%202005.pdf The parts of the CIBER survey outcome that diverge from the findings of the JISC surveys are largely owing to the obvious bias. (And when certain outcomes are still found to be uncongenial, they are hedged, for some reason, in the interpretation sections, by cross-references to irrelevant external documents that contradict the outcome of the CIBER survey!) As an afterthought, I rather wish I had added to my own posting, after: "Nolo contendere. I prefer surveys that do not plant words or thoughts into the surveyee's mouths/minds..." the following: "Better still, I prefer empirical evidence of actual effects to surveys of opinions about hypothetical effects." I have added that to the Hypermail archived version. Studies on what researchers actually do -- i.e., the objective data on the number of papers published in OA journals or self-archived, as well as studies on their actual effects, such as increased download and citation counts -- rather than surveys of researchers' opinions, are what is needed now. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Oct 18 19:27:06 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:53 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright Licence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Roger Clarke wrote: > Stevan Harnad has supported my argument for the appropriate CC > licence to be applied to *pre*prints, as I argued in: > http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/clarke/index.html My colleagues Prof. Charles Oppenheim and Dr. Steve Hitchcock have since pointed out to me that I was in error in supporting the CC license for preprints intended for submission to peer-reviewed journals, for the following two reasons, both of which I recognize to be correct: (1) The implicit copyright that comes with merely posting one's own text ("nakedly") online is sufficient to protect the author from theft of authorship or corruption of text (which are the only two things researchers want protection from). (2) Adopting a prior (unnecessary) CC license for the preprint could be in conflict with the subsequent copyright transfer agreement with the publisher. For both these reasons, and because all the uses the author intends for his preprint (and postprint) are already inherent in the medium [accessing, linking, browsing, searching, on-screen reading, downloading, printing off (locally, for own use, not re-distribution on paper), analyzing computationally, using/applying/building-on the content, fair-use quoting (with attribution) and citing]. NO explicit rights ceding or transfer is needed. Sp neither the pre-publication pre-prints nor the post-publication postprints need a CC license. What authors should be doing is self-archiving them, not creating needless complications for themselves or their publishers by adopting CC licenses for them (unless that is what the publisher's copyright agreement specifies). > But in relation to *post*prints, Stevan said that a copyright licence > is unnecessary, because "the postprints are already covered by > publisher copyright" and each paper "will have its own copyright > transfer agreement, signed with the publisher". > > Sorry Stevan, but your analysis is flawed, and your conclusion wrong. > > Postprints (permitted by Sherpa Blue and Green journals, and of > course where the author retains the copyright) will be downloaded by > people. > > People need to know what terms apply to those copies. The agreement > between the author and the journal-publisher does not solve that > problem. People need to know nothing more about those downloads than they know and need to know about any other free web downloads, viz: accessing, linking, browsing, searching, on-screen reading, downloading, printing off (locally, for own use, not re-distribution on paper), analyzing computationally, using/applying/building-on the content, fair-use quoting (with attribution) and citing. All these come with the territory. And that is all that OA amounts to; that's all the user needs; and that's all the author needs/wants the user to have. No re-publishing online or on paper, no re-use in other works (other than attributed quotes and use of content rather than text), no re-distribution rights on paper or online, apart from what comes with linking -- unless allowed by the publisher's copyright agreement. > I do completely support Stevan's proposition that "authors don't need > more burdens, nor more worries". So applying the licence to both > preprints and postprints needs to be very easy. To achieve that (I > argued in the papers), it needs to be the automatic-but-over-ridable > default. Since the license is neither necessary nor advisable, the only way to make it easy is not to adopt one at all. > I'd be pleased to assist repository-managers to make it easy for > authors to make the By-NC-ND licence available. It no doubt well-meaning of Roger Clarke to offer assistance to make it easy for authors to make a licence available, but the best assistance Roger could offer -- if he means to be assisting OA rather than something else -- is to make it clear that the author does not need to adopt a license at all, for either preprint or postprint. All he needs to do in order to provide OA is to self-archive. Self-archiving is already at least a decade overdue. Please let us not make the coming of age of CC licensing yet another occasion for putting gratuitous obstacles in the clear path to 100% OA. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Oct 19 12:02:46 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:54 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Do PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright Licence? In-Reply-To: <20051019112123.zctcbb60ao4os4w4@oden.shh.fi> Message-ID: On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 vilanka@HANKEN.FI wrote: > Finally I would like to comment that the main point that Roger Clarke makes in > his article, is relevant. There is a problem when we post writings online > without any copyright notice. The default we have in the traditional > (continental) copyright system is that any use requires a permission (license) > from the author if not otherwise granted by a specific provision in law (e.g. > fair- or private use). Thus even if the author's personal intention is to allow > free distribution (e.g. "of course my work may be printed and distributed, > that's why I posted it online"), the default in the law is different. These questions make absolutely no sense out of context. Here is the context: (1) Google indexes billions of digital documents, most of them freely accessible to anyone, anywhere webwide with one click. (2) Millions and millions of web users are accessing those billions of documents daily without the slightest thought about asking for permission to do so. (3) Among those billions of documents are the 15% of the annual 2,500,000 articles that are published annually in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals -- i.e., about 375,000 documents per year -- because they have been self-archived by their authors to make them freely accessible on the web. (4) Missing from those billions of documents are the 85% of the annual 2.5 million articles published annual in the planet's peer-reviewed research journals -- i.e., about 2,125,000 documents per year -- because they have *not* been self-archived by their authors to make them freely accessible on the web. (5) The authors of those absent 2,125,000 documents per year are currently losing 50%-250% of their citation impact. Hence the immediate priority for those 2,125,000 documents per year that are not being self-archived today is *not* to get their authors to self-archive them and also to get them to provide explicit permission to access them, but to get their authors to self-archive them at all. Those 2,125,000 documents per year can then take their chances (along with the other billions of documents being freely accessed daily) that their would-be users may not feel they may access them until given explicit permission. In other words, the real problem is the absence of access-provision, not the absence of access-permission. So we should not be asking these authors (85%) to do more than self-archiving, when they are not yet even doing the self-archiving. > The remaining problem is, [whether] the publisher is interested > in publishing the article after it (or preprint) has been published with a > CC-license online. Ninety-three percent of journals have already said self-archiving is ok with them (70% for postprint self-archiving, 23% for preprint self-archiving). http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php So the problem (for most publishers today) is not with the author self-archiving; but it could well be the prior preprint license, if it is in conflict with the publisher's subsequent copyright agreement for the postprint. And the effect of the problem -- needing to adopt a CC license in order to self-archive -- may well be to discourage rather than encourage the authors of the missing 85% of the annual articles (2,125,000) to self-archive them. And all that, just to provide -- for this tiny, unhappy (and missing) subset of total web content -- the "explicit permissions" that millions of daily web users today are happily and unhesitantly accessing billions of web documents without. Let's deal with the access-permission problem if and when it actually shows any signs of becoming a problem; meanwhile, let us deal with the access-provision problem, which is already very real, and long overdue for resolution. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Oct 22 12:21:20 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:54 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Do PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright Licence? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Michael Carroll wrote: > Stevan Harnad wrote: > > SH: > purposes, not those of OA self-archiving of either preprints or > > postprints. (E.g., they are fine for OA publishing.)>> > > I disagree. Creative Commons licenses clarify and/or enlarge the > user's rights with respect to an article, whether that article is > published or archived online. [Disclosure, I'm on the Creative Commons > Board.] I agree with Michael that it is always much better if freely accessible online work has a CC license. But I am sure Michael will not disagree that, even more important is that the work should be freely accessible online. And most of the OA movement's target content -- 85% of the annual 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals -- is not yet freely accessible online, because its authors have not self-archived them. And their reason is either (1) that they are worried about conflict with their publisher's copyright agreement or (2) that they find just self-archiving it already too much to do (or both reasons). Hence what is needed is not more things for these authors to worry about and/or do, to deter them still further. > I agree with Stevan that self-archiving under terms that are > currently feasible (such as under a green publisher's copyright > agreement) is a desirable first step and should be done immediately. > But I do not agree that the long-term needs of open access have been > fully met by a self-archived article made available under such terms. I am concerned about getting the 85% to take that first step. Then we can work on optimizing it. (Moreover, long-term issues are more pressing for the publisher's official version: the self-archived draft is mainly an immediate-access supplement for those who cannot afford the publisher's version. It is redundant; insofar as long-term preservation is concerned.) > > When a green publisher permits an author to post some version of the > article online, the publisher is silent about what rights the users have > with respect to the article. Copyright lawyers interpret the green > publisher's permission to the author as also the grant of an implied > license to the public. This implied license is important because nearly > every activity is what I call a "copyright event" because it implicates > the rights of the copyright owner. [For more on this concept, see > http://law.bepress.com/villanovalwps/papers/art34/] If the publisher says "go ahead and make it freely accessible on the web" then being able to access it on the web comes with the territory. Anything else sounds like a Shylockian koan; such as "I sell you this cigarette to smoke, but not inhale..." > But the scope of the implied license that a green publisher grants to > the public remains fuzzy. Does the reader have a right to make a RAM > copy of the article in order to read it? Probably. Doesn't matter: it's accessible online 24/7: Certainly nothing to detain the 85% one microsecond longer for. > Does the reader > have a right to print the article or save a copy to her hard drive for > personal use? Probably. Same as above. > May the reader print out 50 copies and > circulate them at a conference on the theory that each attendee could > have printed out an individual copy? Hard to say. Important: This right is not even at issue. OA is about free online access for all. It is not about paper access. > May an institutional > repository repost a copy found on an author's personal web site? > Unclear. Let them just link to the URL. (Again, comes with the online territory. These are relics of papyrocentric thinking.) > A Creative Commons license answers all of the above questions expressly > and in the affirmative. The cause of open access is well-served when an > author retains sufficient rights to grant a Creative Commons license and > does so. But for the time being, it is better than an author with the > limited rights that a green publisher has granted exercise those rights > by self-archiving today. We can leave for another round what steps > authors, their employing institutions or their funders might take to > ensure that authors have the right to grant a Creative Commons license > to the public. As I see it; the problem now is the missing 85%, not the missing right to print 50 copies or to re-post those non-existent documents. Nor should the already vastly overdue 85% and their lost cumulative impact be delayed for one microsecond longer to hold out for these extras, which are not only unneeded but risk deterring authors (and publishers). > 2. Pre-prints/Post-prints. > > This thread got started by the suggestion that a Creative Commons > license could be attached to a pre-print even though the author has > transferred all copyright interest in the article to a publisher. The > posts from Charles Oppenheim and Steve Hitchcock below correctly state > the issues. Although technically distinct, the copyrights in the > pre-print and the post-print overlap. > > The important point to understand is that copyright grants the owner > the right to control exact duplicates and versions that are > "substantially similar" to the copyrighted work. (This is under U.S. > law, but most other jurisdictions similarly define the scope of > copyright). A pre-print will normally be substantially similar to the > post-print. Therefore, when an author transfers the *exclusive* rights > in the work to a publisher, the author precludes herself from making > copies or distributing copies of any substantially similar versions of > the work as well. > > [For example, the singer John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival > fame was sued by a record company, which had acquired the copyright in > his song "Run Through the Jungle". The company claimed that Fogerty's > later song "The Old Man Down the Road" was substantially similar to the > former song and that Fogerty had therefore infringed the copyright that > Fogerty had signed away.] > > Consequently, whether an author may grant the public a Creative Commons > license depends upon the rights the author has at the time of the grant. > As Charles Oppenheim notes, if the author grants a Creative Commons > license in the article prior to transferring copyright to the publisher, > the publisher takes the copyright subject to that license. But before > doing this, authors should read the terms of the publication agreement > they are signing. Some of these agreements call upon the author to > declare that no prior licenses have been granted. Exactly. And that is an excellent reason not to *have* any prior agreements: just self-archive the preprint, before submission to the journal, nakedly, if you wish. But the preprint is not the target of OA: The postprint is. Nothing should put the publisher's acceptance at needless risk. Advice to do that simply deters authors fro, self-archiving at all; preprint or postprint. > Even when the agreement has such a provision, however, publishers will > sometimes agree to take the copyright subject to a previously-granted > license. For example, every researcher who accepts money from NIH or > any other U.S. government agency grants to the U.S. government a > non-exclusive license to publish and reproduce the work. This license is > granted prior to any agreement that the author enters into with a > publisher and therefore published papers funded by NIH research are > subject to the USG's license. Publishers are fully aware of the > government's license and therefore the terms of any copyright agreement > signed by a USG-funded researcher that purports to give all rights to > the publisher has to be interpreted accordingly. "Sometimes" is not a sufficient reassurance for the non-self-archiving 85%... > With that background, let's return to the original question. Once an > author signs a publication agreement, can that author grant a Creative > Commons license in the pre-print? It depends upon the terms of the > agreement, as modified by any addendums. Currently, under most > publication agreements, the author does not retain sufficient rights to > grant a Creative Commons license in either the post-print or the > pre-print after transferring copyright to the publisher. QED. And now we've covered both the preprint and the postprint. > Of course, the author retains the right that all members of the public > have to make a fair use of the article or exercise a fair dealing > privilege, but it is unclear whether this privilege would permit posting > of the pre-print without authorization from a publisher that owns the > copyright in the post-print. For the 93% of journals that are either preprint or postprint this is all moot or irrelevant. For the 7% that are not green, please see the self-archiving FAQ. But 85% of 93% would still be a nice first step (if no one complicates it by advising doing more than necessary, or even putting the 93% green lights at risk!) Stevan Harnad > > > On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Charles Oppenheim wrote: > > > If I offer something under a CC licence and then subsequently agree > to a > > more restrictive publisher's licence, I have set up an > incompatibility... > > The earlier licence over-rides the second. In other words, any > subsequent > > more restrictive licence with a publisher would have no validity and > > would be unenforceable by the publisher. Mind you, the publisher > would > > be perfectly entitled to be annoyed with the author, and may refuse > to > > publish the article and/or refuse to ever have dealings with that > author > > again in the future. > > On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Steve Hitchcock wrote: > > > Roger Clarke proposes that a Creative Commons (CC) licence or similar > for > > self-archived preprints and postprints; Stevan Harnad suggests that > such a > > licence would be a good idea for self-archived preprints only. > Neither > > makes clear exactly why this would be a good thing. Stevan says it is > "to > > *protect* it (the preprint) until the final postprint is ready". But > > > protection isn't the purpose of CC licenses. Protection is vested > with the > > author of a new work in implicit copyright, and self-archiving does > not > > remove that protection. The issue is that authors of self-archived > papers > > typically want to allow users more rights, and to state something to > this > > effect. > > > > This recent article by an admitted non-expert on CC may be helpful to > those > > in seeking similar enlightenment: > > "Creative Commons is actually more about protecting the audience > you're > > hoping will use your work than it is about protecting you. You still > hold > > on to whatever rights you reserve, but you're abandoning some of > those > > rights on purpose." > > Does Creative Commons free your content? > > http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3000_7-6357305-1.html?tag=nl.e501 > > > > To be fair, Roger Clarke makes this point too, but while his main > focus > > seems to be on the position regarding rights transfer to a publisher, > I'm > > not sure whether in this situation a CC licence is necessary or > desirable, > > since it may be a complicating factor. > > > > In Roger's First Monday article the 'process envisaged' in the role > of the > > copyright licence through pre-publication, review and formal > publication > > reaches this point re. the publisher: > > > > "Irrespective of which approach the publisher adopts, the copyright > > arrangements in respect of the final version of the article do not > affect > > the (possibly many) existing licences relating to the (Pr)ePrint. Nor > do > > they affect the ongoing availability of the (Pr)ePrint and of > licences in > > relation to it. They may, however, preclude the provision of later > versions > > of the work, and in particular of the version that is to appear in > the > > refereed venue." > > > > Someone with more legal expertise than me could comment on whether it > is > > correct to say that the copyright arrangement with a publisher *does > not* > > affect the existing (e.g. CC) licences relating to the (Pr)ePrint. > Since it > > is likely to be more restrictive then it seems to undermine the point > of > > any prior licence. > > > > There are good arguments both for CC licences and, to avoid > disrupting the > > path to publication, for sticking with typical publisher licences > (amended > > to allow self-archiving) for postprints. Stevan's position, partly > amended > > here, has always been that CC licences are optional but unnecessary > for > > self-archived works that are intended for publication. That would > appear to > > remain a reasonable recommendation until there is greater clarity > about > > what authors of self-archived papers want to achieve with their > inherent > > rights in this new age of wide online dissemination, and > clarification of > > the legal position of rights statements regarding successive versions > and > > derivative works. > > > > Steve Hitchcock > > IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science > > University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK > > Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk > > Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 > > > > > > At 20:23 16/10/2005, Stevan Harnad wrote: > > >As Roger Clarke's email form letter to Repository Managers is being > > >circulated quite widely, I would accordingly like to make these > comments > > >and suggestions publicly: > > > > > >(1) For the unrefereed, unpublished preprint, it is a good idea to > do > > >as Roger recommends: to adopt some form of provisional Creative > Commons > > >License rather than just putting it "nakedly" on the Web when > self-archiving > > >it. > > > > > > http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ > > > > > >(2) This does not apply, however,, to the final, refereed, > accepted, > > >published draft (the postprint), which is published in a journal, > which > > >will have its own copyright transfer agreement, signed with the > publisher, > > >and which is the primary target of the Open Access movement. > > > > > > "Apercus of WOS Meeting: Making Ends Meet in the Creative > Commons" > > > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3798.html > > > > > >Now some comments: > > > > > >On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Antonella De Robbio wrote: > > > > > > > Dear Stevan > > > > > > > > I received this mail below from Roger Clarke, a Visiting > Professor in Info > > > > Science & Eng Australian National University, Visiting Professor > in the > > > > eCommerce Program, University of Hong Kong and also Visiting > Professor in > > > > the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre Uni of NSW. > > > > I haven't yet reply to him because I have been away and precisely > I have > > > > been as Italian delegate at UNESCO 33.rd general conference where > we have > > > > presented an Open Access resolution as Italian UNESCO > Commission. > > > > Well, I am leaving for Geneva at OAI4 next days where I will > organise the > > > > first E-LIS conference too, at the end of OAI4 event. > > > > I think we must reply to this professor, and so I thought you are > the best > > > > OAIperson who can do it. > > > > I will answer to him too, later, when I will come back to my > conferences > > > > in Geneva. > > > > Please look at this letter, he refers to some his articles on > FirstMOnday > > > > and others.. > > > > > > > > If you reply please put me in cc, so we could be coordinate in > our > > > > actions. > > > > > >My replies appear below: > > > > > > > Thank you! > > > > Antonella De Robbio > > > > E-LIS manager > > > > > > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > > > From: Roger Clarke > > > > To: eprints@dois.it > > > > Subject: PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright > > > > Licence > > > > > > > > Dear ePrint Repository Manager > > > > > > > > The OA/ePrints/Repository movement is very important, and > developing > > > very well. > > > > > > > > But there's a gap in the strategy. > > > > > > > > When an ePrint is downloaded, it's likely that an implicit > copyright > > > > licence comes into existence. There's a lack of clarity about > the > > > > terms that courts might infer to be in such a licence. And > that's > > > > dangerous. > > > > > >It's not *terribly* dangerous, and courts have not much to do with > it: > > >Physicists > > >and computer scientists have been posting "naked" papers online for > over a > > >decade > > >and a half (hundreds of thousands of papers) with no problems. > > > > > >But for the unpublished, unrefereed, not-yet-copyright-protected > > >preprints, it is > > >a good idea to adopt one of the Copyright Commons Licenses to > protect it until > > >the final postprint is ready, accepted by the journal, and > thenceforward > > >covered by the journal's copyright agreement. > > > > > > http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ > > > > > >It is somewhat misleading, though, to say that "eprints," > generically, need a > > >separate license: The preprints do, the postprints do not. > > > > > > > In a paper published in First Monday in August 2005, I analysed > the > > > > requirements for a copyright licence for Pre-Prints. I took care > to > > > > balance the interests of authors, journal-publishers, and the > reading > > > > public. Details of the paper are below. > > > > > >I have read the paper, and most of it is not pertinent to published > > > >postprints. > > > > > > > In a further short paper, I've now extended that analysis to > address > > > > Post-Prints as well. Details of that paper are also below. > > > > > > > > I'd like to submit a recommendation to the 'peak body' of ePrint > > > > Repository Managers; but I haven't been able to find such an > > > > association. > > > > > > > > So I'm approaching each ePrint Repository Manager directly, with > the > > > > following suggestions: > > > > - recommend to authors that they make this licence-type > available > > > > for all PrePrints and PostPrints; > > > > > >Recommendations for naked preprints are welcome, but the postprints > are > > >already > > >covered by publisher copyright. > > > > > > > - provide guidance and support to authors to enable them to do > so > > > > with a minimum of effort; and > > > > > >The guidance should clearly state that this is only pertinent to the > > > >unpublished > > >preprint. > > > > > > > - consider making the availability of this licence-type a > default > > > > for all papers placed in repositories. > > > > > >As the primary target to Open Access Institutional Repositories is > > >not unrefereed preprints but published postprints, the license > should > > >certainly not be incorporated as a default option. It will only > create > > >confusion in the case of the postprint, with the agreement already > signed > > >with the publisher. > > > > > > > THE ANALYSIS RE PRE-PRINTS: > > > > Clarke R. (2005) 'A Proposal for an Open Content Licence for > > > > Research Paper (Pr)ePrints' First Monday 10, 8 (August 2005), > at > > > > http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/clarke/index.html > > > > > > > > The Post-Print of the paper is at: > > > > http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/PrePrLic.html > > > > The Pre-Print of the paper (of 1 May 2005) is at: > > > > http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/PrePrLic050501.html > > > > > > > > > THE ANALYSIS RE POST-PRINTS: > > > > Clarke R. (2005) 'A Standard Copyright Licence for PostPrints' > > > > Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 26 August 2005, at > > > > http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/PostPrLic.html > > > > > > > > THE RECOMMENDED LICENCE-TYPE IS: > > > > Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 > > > > US - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ > > > > and its equivalents, e.g. > > > > UK - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/ > > > > FR - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/fr/ > > > > AU - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.1/au/ > > > > > >These CC licenses are not applicable to articles that are already > under > > >a publisher's copyright agreement. Nor should anyone imply -- at a > time > > >when self-archiving of postprints is still only at 15%, even though > 70% > > >of journals already endorse postprint self-archiving, and 23% more > endorse > > >preprint self-archiving -- that the postprint author need do > anything > > >more than self-archive his postprint. Authors don't need more > burdens, > > >nor more worries (they are already needlessly worried about whether > > >they may self-archive at all). Nor should they be advised > (incorrectly) > > >that in order to self-archive their postprints, they need to > negotiate a > > >different copyright agreement with their publishers. Nor should > copyright > > >licenses be applied to their preprints that might contradict the > copyright > > >agreement that they will be signing for their postprints. > > > > > >In general, copyright is a red herring for Open Access. Yes, make > sure > > >your text > > >is copyright-protected while it's a preprint, but the postprint has > no more > > >copyright problem if it is self-archived than it used to have when > it was not. > > >That is what the copyright agreement with the publisher is for. > > > > > >See the eprint self-archiving FAQ items on copyright: > > > > > > http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/ > > > > > >Stevan Harnad > > > > > > > Other national licences are at: > > > > http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/ > > > > > > > > -- > > > > Roger Clarke > http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/ > > > > > > > > Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 > AUSTRALIA > > > > Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916 > > > > mailto:Roger.Clarke@xamax.com.au > http://www.xamax.com.au/ > > > > > > > > Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng Australian National > University > > > > Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program University of > Hong Kong > > > > Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre Uni > of NSW > > > > > > > > Michael W. Carroll > Associate Professor of Law > Villanova University School of Law > 299 N. Spring Mill Road > Villanova, PA 19085 > 610-519-7088 (voice) > 610-519-5672 (fax) > Research papers at > http://ssrn.com/author=330326 > http://law.bepress.com/villanovalwps/ > > See also www.creativecommons.org > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sun Oct 23 07:28:33 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:54 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Do PrePrints and PostPrints Need a Copyright Licence? In-Reply-To: <435AE39B.5000904@uol.com.br> Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Oct 2005, Imre Simon wrote: > I believe that self-archiving in institutional repositories is a very > important part of the Open Access movement, but I am afraid that just > the availability of the papers in these institutional repositories is > not a solid enough solution. Not a solid enough solution to what? The problem that OA is intended to solve is research access-denial and resulting research impact loss. Self-archiving immediately solves both problems, but only 85% of articles are still not being self-archived, so the access/impact problem becomes the problem of inducing the remaining 85% of articles to be self-archived. Is Imre Simon saying that his "not solid enough" problem trumps the access/impact problem? That optimisation schemes should precede 100% content-provision? And, most important, is he saying providing a "solid enough" solution should take precedence even if it is in fact at odds with inducing authors to provide the missing 85% of OA content? This is the right way to weight these questions, not from the standpoint of abstract optimisation schemes with no regard for the practical problem of getting the content in the first place: > Why? Because what the researcher needs are > focused disciplinary or thematic digital libraries where a researcher > can find a lot of papers in the covered theme or discipline. What the researchers need is the 85% of content, freely accessible for all, online. *Then? we can worry about whether they are missing anything else. > The more > papers in the covered area he finds there the better it is. Before a paper can be found; free online; it must be made free online. The reason 85% of papers are not findable is because they have not been made OA. > In a one > stop search he can find the paper he is looking for, instead of having > to go to dozens of institutional repositories, each one with his own > user interface. Imre, please look at the OAI interoperability protocol, and the OAI IR harvesters, such as OAIster, or even scirus or google scholar. You are reaking down open doors. > Even more important and useful would be if the full text of the papers > could be digested (indexed) by computer programs and one could navigate > in the disciplinary library through search engines using the full text > of the papers making use of the text of all other papers as well to > determine the ranking of a given paper (number of citations, for > instance). That problem will find its place in the queue once we have 100% OA. At the present 15% OA is is a joke, compared to the access denial to 85% of the content for thos ewho cannot afford access to the journal version. > Other navigations could be made available: through forward or > backward references, through hubs and authorities, through text > similarity or through cited bibliography similarity. A living example, > with over 700.000 papers with full text in Computer Science is CiteSeer, > a very useful digital library, a true > research outlet in Computer Science. See also Citebase. > The one condition that makes > CiteSeer less powerful is the fact that it is still far from complete. Correct. And providing that missing 85% content is right now the 1st, 2nd and Nth priority. All else depends on it. Correcct. > > Theoretically, at least, these disciplinary digital libraries could be > realized through the OAI protocols, each of them would be a "service > provider" in the OAI jargon. That is to say, the service provider would > harvest the papers in the institutional repositories, copy the full text > of the papers, index them conveniently and make its services available > to its users. Not just theoretically, but in actual practice. What is missing is not functionality, but content. > Given this scenario, I would like to pose two questions to specialists > in copyright law, which I am most certainly not. > > Considering the existing permissions to self-archive, given by green > publishers, do they allow the electronic copy (by a robot) of the full > text of the self-archived papers, so that they can be indexed by an > interested service provider and allow him to deliver the services of the > type described? I think that they probably do not allow for this, but > would like to hear a more informed opinion. Why is this question even being asked now; when the 15% of self-archived content *is* being harvested by all these indexers, whereas the 85% is not being provided? Why talk about copyright when the problem is missing content? > The second question is this: assuming that the author would have > retained the right to distribute his paper under a Creative Commons > Attribution-NonCommercial license (or even freer than that), would that > license allow the copy and the operations dewscribed in the paragraph > above? I think that with a CC license this operation would be perfectly > legal, even by a robot, but again, I would like to hear a more informed > opinion. As I have suggested repeatedly, self-archiving just reuaires self-archiving, not the CC license, which could be in conflict even with a green publisher's copyright agreement, and hence in conflict with the author's inclination to self-archive (at a time when 85% of authors don't yet self-archive)? If I sound a little shrill, it is because we have already needlessly lost at least 10 years of access and impact because of fretting about or getting distracted by irrelevancies. It would be good if we could keep our eyes on the ball just long enough to reach 100% OA. After that, it can be a free-for-all for the meliorists. Till then, please let's focus on solving the real immediate problem, at long last. > If my reasoning is correct, this would be another definitive and very > important difference between having or not having a CC license available > to the author to distribute his paper. And if my reasoning is correct, this is a completely irrelevant distrction at this time. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Oct 28 07:23:48 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:54 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Drubbing Peter to Pox Paul In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Prior AmSci Topic Thread: "Drubbing Peter to Pay Paul" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4152.html BioMed Central (BMC) has written a very good reply to Lord Sainsbury's recent remarks about the RCUK policy proposal: http://www.biomedcentral.com/openletter/20051027/ BMC's point that it is untrue that there is a decline of interest in open access publishing is quite correct. Interest continues to rise. Minor point: Rather than cite over-reliance on Journal Citation Impact Factors (though there *is* over-reliance on Journal Citation Impact Factors) as a "level playing field" matter, disadvantaging new OA journal start-ups, my strategy would have been to stress the overwhelming evidence of the OA Citation Advantage at the author/article level, as demonstrated by the within-journal comparisons between what has and has not been made OA through self-archiving. http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm BMC's passage about ignoring the UK Select Committee's impartial advice on Open Access Self-Archiving is also very helpful and spot-on (though I rather wish -- again a very minor point -- that Matt had called it "Self-Archiving" rather than just "Archiving," which always makes it sound ambiguous as between OA provision itself and mere preservation-archiving). It might also have been helpful to point out to Lord S that 93% of the journals in the Romeo index have already given their green light to self-archiving, whereas it is Lord S who appears to be ambivalent about RCUK's proposal to mandate it. Lord S wrote: Lord S: "what [RCUK] said effectively is we want you to publish it as soon as you can, subject to reaching agreement with the publishers as to when that would be. That seems to me to put researchers in an impossible position, ie, every individual researcher has got to start negotiating with the publisher as to what that means." http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/uc490-i/uc49002.htm I would say that the one nearer an impossible position is not the researcher, but Lord S, who has not understood the RCUK proposal; he has (yet again) conflated OA publishing (which is not what RCUK is proposing to mandate) with OA self-archiving (of *published* articles), which is what RCUK is proposing to mandate. Lord S is (yet again) drubbing Peter (OA self-archiving, green) to pox Paul (OA publishing, gold), as he did with the Select Committee proposal, which he also misunderstood: "Drubbing Peter to pox Paul" Thursday December 2, 2004 Guardian Education http://education.guardian.co.uk/higherfeedback/story/0,11056,1364556,00.html With about 93% of journals already green on OA self-archiving, Lord S is being more royalist than the sovereign, more catholic than the pope... http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php The following (*extremely* hirsute) passage from Lord S alas does not attest to a clear grasp of what is at issue, even when he endeavours to consider OA self-archiving separately: Lord S: "The question of institutional repositories is a slightly different one because I think there is a role for institutional repositories [SH: So far so good], but in rather specific circumstances, which is there is a whole series of fields of research where the people like publishing their papers and what they are doing before they send them to the journals, and this is a very good way of communication between research communities. The question here is what is the requirement or the desire for people to publish them alongside publishing them in the actual journals? [SH: Lord S seems here both to be conflating (1a) publishing with (1b) providing access to the publication and (2a) pre-peer-review preprints with (2b) post-peer-review postprints] I think that is for individual universities to decide for themselves as to whether that is a cost [SH: Cost? Cost of what? Cost to whom?] that they think is justified subject to whatever agreement is reached with the publishers on what is the proper thing to do." http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/uc490-i/uc49002.htm Agreement? 93% of journals have already given their blessing to author self-archiving. But so preoccupied is Lord S with the costs to and of the journal trade that he seems to be missing entirely the fact that the RCUK self-archiving mandate is meant to recover a needless ongoing cost to the British tax-payer, who funds RCUK research, namely, the loss of at least 50% (i.e., about ?1.5 billion's-worth) of citation impact on the RCUK's annual ?3.5 billion investment in research, a loss that occurs because currently the only researchers who can access a UK research finding are those whose institutions can afford access to the journal in which that finding happens to be published. Access denied to all the rest of its would-be users. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html The RCUK self-archiving mandate is intended to make RCUK-funded research output accessible also to those would-be users who cannot afford the journal in which it happens to be published, so as to remedy the needlessly lost usage and impact of UK research findings, to maximise their uptake, usage, and applications, and thereby to maximise the benefits to British tax-payers resulting from the research that they have paid for. Where do journal-costs and publishing-models figure at all in this equation? The transaction seems to be primarily one between the British tax-payer and the British research community that it funds to produce research, research which is in turn intended to be used and applied for the benefit of the British tax-payer, not to serve as a product to be sold, as in a supermarket, for the benefit of some other party. Publishers certainly add value (and earn revenue) from this transaction too, but their retail side-trade surely is not what it is all about! Surely Lord S is not just our trade minister, but our science minister as well. As such, he should stop conflating trade matters with research matters, especially when it otherwise entails the tail wagging the dog. Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2005) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/ From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Oct 29 09:32:12 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:55 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Lord Sainsbury on the RCUK OA Proposal: Drubbing Peter to Pox Paul In-Reply-To: <002701c5dc38$c71998f0$791e09c0@Arun> Message-ID: On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote: > My point is scientists, like the British Minister, are highly educated and > yet they find it difficult to appreciate what to you and me appear to be > simple. > > We must think through this phenomenon and come up with a good workable > solution. Dear Arun, You are quite right that it is both puzzling and frustrating that such simple, transparent and even trivial things keep being systematically misunderstood by people who not only speak the language but are quite intelligent. There are only a few possible explanations. I have no idea which is correct (though I have my hunches), but here they are: (1): The premises of Open Access are wrong. There is in fact either (1a) no need for all those who do not currently have access to have access, or, if there is a need, then there is (1b) no way for all of them them to have access, or, if there is a way for all of them to have access, then (1c) it is either illegal or financially nonviable. (2): (1) above is false, but people do not know how or why. (3): (1) above is false, and people know how and why, but they have reasons for preferring that it should not come to pass anyway, hence they treat (1) as if it were true. My own hunch is that (2) is closest to the truth. There may be some in the publishing community who are closer to (3), but I do not believe that it is they who are holding back OA. OA is provided by and for the research community. It is in reality 100% in their hands, and always has been. Hence if they are not yet providing it, it is certain that this is not because of publishers. It is because of (2): the research community does not (yet) know that (1) is false, nor how, nor why. And if you want a functional analogy to this state of anosognosia (a neurological condition in which a patient -- with intelligence fully intact -- keeps systematically failing to perceive what is amiss, and what to do about it), here is an example. A professor, an intelligent professor, with full command of the English language, has a stroke that leaves all of his intellectual faculties unimpaired but (temporarily) paralyses the left side of his body, leaving it unable to move or feel. You visit the professor in his hospital bed and he is of course perfectly lucid, sharp as ever, reading the latest edition of PLoS Biology, etc., but his left leg is dangling off the side of his bed. You ask him "What is happening here?" He asks what you mean. "I mean this" (pointing to the leg). The professor seems not to have noticed it, but now that you draw it to his attention to it, he says: "Oh, that. It's a leg. It was in my bed, so I pushed it out." Astonished, you reply: "But it's *your* leg!" Professor (not astonished, but puzzled): "My leg?" "Yes, your leg. Look, I start from the foot and trace it up, you see it is connected to and leads to your body?" Professor (still puzzled): "Quite so, I suppose you are right." "Here, I will put it back in your bed for you: But are you in the habit of seeing disembodied legs, and merely pushing them out of your bed without asking any further questions?" Professor (still puzzled): "No, of course not, you are quite right. How silly of me. I don't know what came over me!" The conversation continues, on other matters. Ninety-seconds later, the professor pushes his leg out of the bed, without missing a beat. Anosognosia. And that is what it has felt like for years, explaining OA and self-archiving to researchers, till they nod with apparent understanding, only to relapse within 90 seconds. I've even given the syndrome a name -- Zeno's Paralysis -- and prescribed the FAQ to be ingested whenever any of its 32 symptoms (so far known) manifest themselves. "Zeno's Paradox and the Road to the Optimal/Inevitable" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0820.html http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32-worries Let us hope that an appeal to their employers and funders will be more successful. After all, it is not *their* leg that is in question. Perhaps, like hospital attendants, they can see to it that researchers do the right thing. Then the patients can go back to reading and writing their journals... The epidemiology and chronology of the pandemic can then be left to the psychohistorians. Cheers, Stevan PS I suspect that conflating/confusing green and gold will turn out to have played a big part in the long road road to the optimal/inevitable recovery. On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote: > Dear Stevan: > > We should try to understand why many people have problems in understanding > what we think is simple English. For example, Lord Sainsbury, you say, has > misunderstood the RCUK proposal as well as the earlier Select Committee > proposal. He is a Minister in the UK Government and obviously must be an > educated person. And English is his mother tongue. He is not a second > generation immigrant from the subcontinent or Africa. And yet you find him > 'misunderstanding' simple English statements. > > A number of Indians, many of them very bright young graduates, are unable to > go to US (or British) universities to pursue higher studies because they > fail to clear English as a Foreign Language test. I can understand that, as > even today many rural Indian schools have problems hiring good English > teachers. Is there a similar problem in the UK too? > > More importantly, if people in positions of power take decisions on the > basis of wrong perceptions, how can we correct what we see as their wrong > decisions? > > Yesterday I was returning from Bangalore by a late evening flight, after > attending a conference on India's competitiveness and preparedness to > progress in a knowledge economy/society, which was attended, among others, > by the chairman and most of the members of the high power Science Advisory > Council to the Prime Minister. On the flight I met an old friend, a marine > zoologist and a Fellow of the Indian national Science Academy. I tried to > explain to him the advantages of OA self archiving, but he was insisting > that as far as he was concerned it was enough if he published in a reputed > journal (most journals in his field he told me were published by commercial > publishers). I said even then he could still deposit his papers in an > archive, to which he replied that it would lead to copyright violation and > the journals would refuse to publish his papers any more. > > My point is scientists, like the British Minister, are highly educated and > yet they find it difficult to appreciate what to you and me appear to be > simple. > > We must think through this phenomenon and come up with a good workable > solution. > > Regards. > > Arun > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Stevan Harnad" > To: "King MPST" > Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:24 PM > Subject: [BOAI] Lord Sainsbury on the RCUK OA Proposal: Drubbing Peter to > Pox Paul > > > > BioMed Central (BMC) has written a very good reply to Lord Sainsbury's > > recent remarks about the RCUK policy proposal: > > > > http://www.biomedcentral.com/openletter/20051027/ > > > > BMC's point that it is untrue that there is a decline of interest > > in open access publishing is quite correct. Interest continues to rise. > > > > Minor point: Rather than cite over-reliance on Journal Citation Impact > > Factors > > (though there *is* over-reliance on Journal Citation Impact Factors) > > as a "level playing field" matter, disadvantaging new OA journal > > start-ups, > > my strategy would have been to stress the overwhelming evidence of the OA > > Citation Advantage at the author/article level, as demonstrated by the > > within-journal comparisons between what has and has not been made OA > > through > > self-archiving. > > > > http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ > > http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm > > > > BMC's passage about ignoring the UK Select Committee's impartial advice > > on Open Access Self-Archiving is also very helpful and spot-on (though > > I rather wish -- again a very minor point -- that Matt had called it > > "Self-Archiving" rather than just "Archiving," which always makes it sound > > ambiguous as between OA provision itself and mere preservation-archiving). > > > > It might also have been helpful to point out to Lord S that 93% of the > > journals in the Romeo index have already given their green light to > > self-archiving, whereas it is Lord S who appears to be ambivalent about > > RCUK's proposal to mandate it. Lord S wrote: > > > > Lord S: "what [RCUK] said effectively is we want you to publish it as > > soon > > as you can, subject to reaching agreement with the publishers as > > to when that would be. That seems to me to put researchers in an > > impossible position, ie, every individual researcher has got to > > start negotiating with the publisher as to what that means." > > http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/uc490-i/uc49002.htm > > > > I would say that the one nearer an impossible position is not the > > researcher, but Lord S, who has not understood the RCUK proposal; he has > > (yet again) conflated OA publishing (which is not what RCUK is proposing > > to mandate) with OA self-archiving (of *published* articles), which is > > what RCUK is proposing to mandate. Lord S is (yet again) drubbing Peter > > (OA self-archiving, green) to pox Paul (OA publishing, gold), as he did > > with the Select Committee proposal, which he also misunderstood: > > > > "Drubbing Peter to pox Paul" > > Thursday December 2, 2004 > > Guardian Education > > > > http://education.guardian.co.uk/higherfeedback/story/0,11056,1364556,00.html > > > > With about 93% of journals already green on OA self-archiving, Lord S is > > being > > more royalist than the sovereign, more catholic than the pope... > > > > http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php > > > > The following (*extremely* hirsute) passage from Lord S alas does not > > attest > > to a clear grasp of what is at issue, even when he endeavours to consider > > OA self-archiving separately: > > > > Lord S: "The question of institutional repositories is a slightly > > different one because I think there is a role for institutional > > repositories [SH: So far so good], but in rather specific > > circumstances, which is there is a whole series of fields of research > > where the people like publishing their papers and what they are doing > > before they send them to the journals, and this is a very good way > > of communication between research communities. The question here > > is what is the requirement or the desire for people to publish > > them alongside publishing them in the actual journals? [SH: Lord S > > seems here both to be conflating (1a) publishing with (1b) providing > > access to the publication and (2a) pre-peer-review preprints with > > (2b) post-peer-review postprints] I think that is for individual > > universities to decide for themselves as to whether that is a cost > > [SH: Cost? Cost of what? Cost to whom?] that they think is justified > > subject to whatever agreement is reached with the publishers on what > > is the proper thing to do." > > http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/uc490-i/uc49002.htm > > > > Agreement? 93% of journals have already given their blessing to author > > self-archiving. But so preoccupied is Lord S with the costs to and > > of the journal trade that he seems to be missing entirely the fact > > that the RCUK self-archiving mandate is meant to recover a needless > > ongoing cost to the British tax-payer, who funds RCUK research, namely, > > the loss of at least 50% (i.e., about ?1.5 billion's-worth) of citation > > impact on the RCUK's annual ?3.5 billion investment in research, a loss > > that occurs because currently the only researchers who can access a UK > > research finding are those whose institutions can afford access to the > > journal in which that finding happens to be published. Access denied to > > all the rest of its would-be users. > > > > http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html > > http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html > > > > The RCUK self-archiving mandate is intended to make RCUK-funded research > > output accessible also to those would-be users who cannot afford > > the journal in which it happens to be published, so as to remedy the > > needlessly lost usage and impact of UK research findings, to maximise > > their uptake, usage, and applications, and thereby to maximise the > > benefits to British tax-payers resulting from the research that they > > have paid for. > > > > Where do journal-costs and publishing-models figure at all in this > > equation? The transaction seems to be primarily one between the British > > tax-payer and the British research community that it funds to produce > > research, research which is in turn intended to be used and applied for > > the benefit of the British tax-payer, not to serve as a product to be > > sold, as in a supermarket, for the benefit of some other party. Publishers > > certainly add value (and earn revenue) from this transaction too, but > > their retail side-trade surely is not what it is all about! > > > > Surely Lord S is not just our trade minister, but our science minister > > as well. As such, he should stop conflating trade matters with research > > matters, especially when it otherwise entails the tail wagging the dog. > > > > Stevan Harnad > > > > AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: > > A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing > > open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2005) > > is available at: > > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ > > To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: > > http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html > > Post discussion to: > > american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org > > > > UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional > > policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, > > please describe your policy at: > > http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php > > > > UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: > > BOAI-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access > > journal > > http://romeo.eprints.org/ > > OR > > BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when > > a suitable one exists. > > http://www.doaj.org/ > > AND > > in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article > > in your institutional repository. > > http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ > > http://archives.eprints.org/ > > http://openaccess.eprints.org/ > > > > > > > >