From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Aug 5 10:18:24 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:43 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Four Seminal Swan/Brown JISC Reports on Open Access In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Excerpted from Peter Suber's Open Access News: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_07_31_fosblogarchive.html#a112324918727038442 PS: Librarians at Georgia State University have posted this excerpt from Crispin Davis' remarks at the Interim 2005 Reed Elsevier Analysts Meeting: CD: "Open Access, is now 8 years in and their total market share remains below 1%. And all the data, the evidence, the research shows that the authors really are not very interested in having their papers published in Open Access journals. Open Archiving, the more we get into this, the more we research it, the more we talk to the scientific community, the more questionable I think the benefits become. Certainly authors have very little interest in open archiving. Less than 5% of authors are interested or are putting their peer review papers on their institutional repositories. The researchers themselves don't like it, for understandable reasons. What a researcher wants is to be able to access 6m, 8m, 10m articles by subject all cross-ref, interlinked to actual language search and individual depositories do exactly the opposite of that. So I think that open archiving increasingly is going to be challenged." http://www.library.gsu.edu/news/index.asp?view=details&ID=6871&typeID=62 PS: Comment. Davis is wrong on the facts. 1. On OA journals, submissions are growing and authors who have not submitted work to them are deterred more by ignorance than opposition. According to the July 2004 Swan-Brown study of author attitudes toward OA journals : S-B: "[when]presented with a list of reasons why they have not chosen to publish in an OA journal and asked to say which were important...[t]he reason that scored highest (70%) was that authors were not familiar enough with OA journals in their field." http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11003/ 2. On OA archiving, far more authors have archived than he thinks, and for those who haven't, there is much less opposition than ignorance. According to the May 2005 Swan-Brown study of author attitudes toward self-archiving: S-B: 'Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years in at least one of the three possible ways -- by placing a copy of an article in an institutional (or departmental) repository, in a subject-based repository, or on a personal or institutional website. More people (27%) have so far opted for the last method -- putting a copy on a website -- than have used institutional (20%) or subject-based (12%) repositories, though the main growth in self-archiving activity over the last year has been in these latter two more structured, systematic methods for providing open access. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories....There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option.' http://cogprints.org/4385/ Posted on OAN by Peter Suber at 8/05/2005 09:12:00 AM. From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Aug 5 13:40:03 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:43 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Re-engineering the Open Access Movement I: Addressing What is Currently Missing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sherif Masoud wrote in http://www.geocities.com/sxm418/reoa.htm : > [1] Open Access Trade Page @ http://www.geocities.com/sxm418/oa.htm > [2] Learning Internet Resources @ http://www.geocities.com/sxm418/lir.htm > > I suggest that the efforts of the open access (OA) advocates be utilized in a > different way from the current one so that the open access potential successes are > expedited. I propose that roughly one third of such efforts be directed towards > increasing the use of current OA publications. I am not sure whose efforts are being targeted here (OA advocates, libraries, publishers, researchers, universities, research-funders) nor how much effort any of these is actually expending for OA today. But the fact is that about 20% of research output is being made OA today (5% by publishing it in OA journals, 15% by self-archiving it). The objective would seem to be to raise that 20% to 100% as soon as possible, rather than to try to squeeze more usage and functionality out of the impoverished 20% that exists to date. For this, I would say that 100% of effort should be expended on inducing researchers to make 100% of their research articles OA. > Using the OA resources more extensively will result in higher awareness > and impact for the OA publications. This will lead to readers (users) and > authors demanding more OA publications and repositories. This increased > demand will result in higher OA supply in the form of OA journals and > repositories, which is the end goal of the OA movement. This is what I too thought 6 years ago, when OAI and OpCit and Citebase and OAister were launched: Surely as the research community experiences the power and utility of OA as *users* (consumers) they will translate their satisfaction into their behaviour as *authors* (providers). But that didn't happen -- partly because of the limited functional possibilities of such sparse coverage (20%), no matter how deluxe, and partly because of the (wrong) perception that much more effort is entailed in being an OA provider rather than just an OA consumer. This perception is wrong, and the number of keystrokes and time involved in a moderately intensive online search are comparable to the number of keystrokes and time involved in making one of one's own articles OA by self-archiving it: 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/ Yet not even the repeated demonstration of the dramatic increase in citation impact for articles made OA by self-archiving has yet proved sufficient to persuade nearly enough authors to self-archive; Brody, T. and Harnad, S. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals. D-Lib Magazine 10(6). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10207/ http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html The solution is clear, and has been clearly stated by authors themselves, in their responses to two international, interdisciplinary JISC surveys showing that most authors state they will not self-archive until and unless their employers and/or their research-funders require it -- but if/when they do require it, over 94% of authors say they will do it (81% of them willingly, 14% reluctantly, and only 6% say they still will not do it): Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ So what is urgently needed worldwide today is definitely *not* a diversion of effort toward user functionality for the sparse 20% OA content that already exists, but a concerted effort to get researchers' employers and funders to require OA self-archiving. Research Councils UK looks as if it will adopt a policy of requiring OA self-archiving at the end of this month, and if they do, it is very likely that other institutions worldwide will follow suit. The blueprint for the policy requirement is already there: RCUK Proposed Policy Requirement: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp UK Select Committee Proposed Policy Requirement: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm Berlin-3 Proposed Policy Requirement: http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html Registry of Institutional OA Self-Archiving Policies http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php > Reviewing a few Internet publications on open access [1], I found that almost > every open access (OA) advocate's efforts are in one of two directions: analyzing, > understanding, and explaining that OA is much more useful than closed access for > everybody (except maybe for giant publishers) or promoting the foundation of OA > serials / repositories and publishing in them. While the domination of OA serials > and repositories form the end goal of the OA movement, I believe the current > direction of efforts is not the best one to achieve that end goal in the fastest > way possible. Re-engineering the open access movement to address what is currently > missing can be very useful in expediting the domination of open access. The end goal is 100% OA, and the two roads to 100% OA are the "golden" road of publishing articles in OA journals or the "green" road of self-archiving in OA archives all articles published in non-OA journals. Neither informing researchers about the benefits of OA nor showing them how to derive those benefits is enough: Their employers and funders also need to *require* it (just as they already require publishing itself: "publish or perish") for the sake of maximizing individual and institutional research impact and maximizing the return on research funders investment in research, in terms of research uptake, usage, impact and progress. Diverting efforts toward increasing the functionality of the sparse OA content that already exists would simply delay still longer the optimal, inevitable, and already long overdue outcome: 100% OA. > I propose that only a certain part of the OA advocates' efforts be directed > towards supporting the extensive use of OA publications. I don't mean a total > change; I am saying that roughly two thirds of the efforts should stay in the > current directions, but the rest should be in the direction of promoting the > extensive use of OA publications. There is no point promoting the extensive use of sparse content! What is missing is the content, not the usage or the functionality. The greater usage of OA content is already fully demonstrated by its already-existing citation advantage of 50%-250+% as well its usage (download) advantage. Those cows (20%) cannot be milked more fully! We need more cows (100%). > Amplifying the use and citations of the OA publications will result in > higher awareness and impact for the OA literature. As the impact and > awareness keep amplifying, the readers (users) and authors' demand > for OA literature (serials and repositories) will intensify. This > increased demand will result in higher OA supply (in the form of OA > journals and repositories), which is the end goal of the OA movement. But the usage and citations of OA articles are already greatly amplified, this has been happening for years, and has lately been demonstrated repeatedly, in field after field. These findings are useful, and will certainly persuade *some* more authors to provide OA to their work, but not nearly enough. What is needed is an OA-provision requirement from researchers' employers and funders. The employers and funders, in turn, are the ones who are being persuaded to adopt the policy of requiring OA-provision by the already abundant evidence that OA enhances research usage and impact. Is a 50%-250% advantage not already advantage enough? http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm > So the question that rises is "how to promote the use of OA publications"? > > Well, the degree of using and citing OA literature is proportional to how easy it > is to access that literature. Therefore OA advocates, both librarians and academic > experts, have vital roles to play here. Librarians, the guardians of libraries, > should be natural OA advocates because OA helps them mitigate the serials crisis. > Hence, they should mine for OA resources all over the Internet and present it to > their academic communities in an easy to use way. But Sherif, the ease-of-access effect and the evidence for it are already there! (And although librarians are great allies to the OA movement, it is a great mistake to imagine that the rationale for researchers providing OA is to mitigate the serials crisis! The rationale is to maximize research usage, impact and progress.) > Innovative techniques are expected to achieve good results. I mean that > the starting point is: the Internet is there containing all the open > access publications and the search engines are there giving millions > of page results to searchers. Of course a starting point like that > --if it is also the final point-- is not very promising. Innovatively, > the final point, could be a website that integrates all the sources in > an institution's library and the Internet (e.g. open access journals) > with a scope encompassing a researcher's specific point of research > (e.g. gear design in mechanical engineering). This was the reason the OAI interoperability protocol was designed in 1999. Please have a look at OAister and Citebase and Google Scholar. The functionality is already there (and being heavily used). What is missing is 80% of the content! http://www.openarchives.org/ http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ http://citebase.eprints.org/ http://scholar.google.com/ > That's only one innovative example; I am sure there are > many creative ways in which librarians can catalog Internet OA content to make > them easy to use. Let's start thinking that not properly guiding the library > patrons to available OA resources is analogous to having very generous donators > that donate lots of publications to a library and also pay for storing them to be > only left in the warehouse without being added to the library catalog (although > the keys of the warehouse are available for patrons upon request for digging on > their own). Sherif, I'm afraid these are rather old-fashioned views on functionality in the online age. What users need today is not more cataloguing or help from librarians: They need more OA content (preferably OAI-compliant): 80% more. That's all. The rest will take care of itself. > On the other hand, as experts in precise fields of research, academic OA advocates > are also urged --individually or collaboratively-- to form Internet research > guides on their fields of studies. Why? Why produce guides to a sparse 20% of content? And why have guides at all, when OAI full-text content can be inverted and searched boole/google-style, with the help of citation-links and -metrics as well as similarity-metrics. What's missing today, and urgently needed, is more OA content, not more OA visibility/classification/navigation resources: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#26.Classification > Another point, the design of such Internet research guides should > always be user-centered. That means for the user (researcher or reader) > a closed access database (e.g. only table of contents, abstracts, > or even pay-per view) could be very useful along with OA publications. Anyone who wishes to build value-added services on top of OA content is welcome to do so -- but first we need the OA content, otherwise there is precious little to add the value *to*. > I mean finally what will get the impact and awareness is open access, but for the > research guides to be successful in attracting researchers they have to be hybrid > in order to fulfil all of the researchers' requirements. Along with that, the > benefits of open access should always be advertised, so that researchers not only > know about them practically (when using the OA movement research guides) but also > understand the theory behind them (how this is happening). Needless to say, the OA > advertising should never annoy or disturb the users; it should come naturally. > Moreover, it will be easy to recruit at least some of the users of those research > guides to the OA movement, to advocate for open access themselves later. To > illustrate what I am suggesting, [2] represents an attempt of creating an Internet > research guide that integrates both OA and other forms of learning sources, > coupling that to non-destructive OA advertising. There has been a modest flow from OA usage/consumption to OA provision, indeed that is part of the source of the existing 20% OA content. But it is clear that nowhere near enough OA content can be expected (within the visible future) via that slow and indirect route. Something far more substantive is needed to end the already absurdly long in reaching 100% OA, and that something is what authors themselves have said they would need in order to induce them to provide OA: a policy of requiring it by their employers and/or funders. > To optimally achieve open access in scholarly publishing, the scope of efforts > should encompass every possible way of open access (not only scholarly > publishing). OA is not OA-in-scholarly-publishing, it is OA-to-scholarly-publications. OA is no more a reform of scholarly publishing than it is a remedy for the serials crisis. It is a way for researchers to maximize the usage and impact of their own research publications (whether the golden way, by publishing them in OA journals, or the green way, by publishing them in non-OA journals but also self-archiving them in OA Archives). Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30 (4) 2004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.013 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10209/ > I propose that the efforts in this direction be at all levels (e.g. > for students, researchers, and practitioners). There are mutual interactions among > those groups, so the more open access is appreciated among, for example, college > students, the more it will be among researchers. One reason is that the students > of today are the researchers of the near future. Further, creative traditional > print books on open access are needed. The traditional books still have their > audience that respect them and see them as almost the only authority in any topic. > The open access movement needs to address such an audience. If we wait for students to come of age in order to reach 100% OA we are waiting absurdly long, and needlessly losing a great deal of potential research impact and progress in the meanwhile. Researchers are happy for students and practitioners to read and use their research, but they are writing it mainly for their fellow researchers (that's what their careers and funding depend on): It is their fellow researchers who can build on their research, thereby extending its impact. Researchers will not be persuaded to provide OA by evidence of enhanced usage by students (or practitioners, in that minority of research fields where there even *are* practitioners at all!); after all, they are not yet even sufficiently persuaded by the evidence of enhanced usage and impact by and for their fellow-researchers! The persuasion will have to come from the same source that persuades them to publish in the first place (rather than put their research findings in a desk-drawer and move on to the next piece of curiosity-driven, solipsistic research): the persuasion will have to come from their employers and funders. > A proposal for re-engineering the open access movement by re-directing the current > efforts of the OA advocates was presented. It is hoped that this proposal will > raise a lot of discussions, ultimately resulting in substantial improvements. If everyone who wishes to invest some time and effort into promoting OA were to invest it, first, into (1) self-archiving 100% of their own work, and, second, into (2) persuading their own institution to adopt a policy of requiring self-archiving for 100% of its research output, that time and effort would be immeasurably better spent than investing it in trying to enhance the functionality of the impoverished 20% OA content we have today. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php 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 Sun Aug 7 17:29:21 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:43 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: A Keystroke Koan For Our Open Access Times In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: An update of this 2003 posting has been posted to Open Access Archivangelism: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/14-guid.html From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Aug 16 07:05:10 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:43 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] New Book: 'Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation' by Henk F. Moed (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 11:31:12 +0200 From: Ed Noyons To: SIGMETRICS@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU It is a great pleasure to announce the publication of my monograph: Henk F. Moed: 'Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation' (Springer, 2005. 350 pp. ISBN: 1-4020-3713-9). Please find below a summary presenting its main lines and the table of contents. For further information I refer to the CWTS website (http://www.cwts.nl) and to http://www.springeronline.com/1-4020-3713-9 Henk F. Moed Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) Leiden University, the Netherlands Email: moed@cwts.leidenuniv.nl ---------------------------------------- Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation. By Henk. F. Moed Springer, 2005. 350 pp. ISBN: 1-4020-3713-9. This book is written for members of the scholarly research community, and for persons involved in research evaluation and research policy. More specifically, it is directed towards the following four main groups of readers: - All scientists and scholars who have been or will be subjected to a quantitative assessment of research performance using citation analysis. - Research policy makers and managers who wish to become conversant with the basic features of citation analysis, and about its potentialities and limitations. - Members of peer review committees and other evaluators, who consider the use of citation analysis as a tool in their assessments. - Practitioners and students in the field of quantitative science and technology studies, informetrics, and library and information science. It deals with the evaluation of scholarly research performance, and focuses on the contribution of scholarly work to the advancement of scholarly knowledge. Its principal question is: how can citation analysis be used properly as a tool in the assessment of such a contribution? Citation analysis involves the construction and application of a series of indicators of the 'impact', 'influence' or 'quality' of scholarly work, derived from references cited in footnotes or bibliographies of scholarly research publications. It describes primarily the use of data extracted from the Science Citation Index and the Web of Science, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)/Thomson Scientific. But many aspects to which this book dedicates attention relate to citation analysis in general. It provides a wide range of important facts, and corrects a number of common misunderstandings about citation analysis. It introduces basic notions and distinctions, and deals both with theoretical and technical aspects, and with its applicability in various policy contexts, at the level of individual scholars, research groups, departments, institutions, national scholarly systems, disciplines or subfields, and scholarly journals. Although the major part of the analysis relates to the basic science - a domain in which citation analysis is used most frequently - this book also addresses its uses and limits in the applied and technical sciences, social sciences and humanities. It reveals the enormous potential of quantitative, bibliometric analyses of the scholarly literature for a deeper understanding of scholarly activity and performance, and highlights their policy relevance. But this book is also critical, underlines the limits of citation analysis in research evaluation, and issues warnings for potential misuse. It proposes criteria for proper use of citation analysis as a research evaluation tool. In order to be used properly as a research evaluation tool, it is essential that all participants have insight into the nature of citation analysis, how its indicators are constructed and calculated, what the various theoretical positions state about what they measure, and what are their potentialities and limitations, particularly in relation to peer review. This book aims at providing such insight. Table of Contents Preface ix Executive Summary 1 Part 1 General Introduction and Main Conclusions 9 1 General Introduction 11 2 Basic Notions and General Conclusions 25 3 Synopsis 35 Part 2 Empirical and Theoretical Chapters 69 Part 2.1 Assessing Basic Science Research Departments and Scientific Journals 69 4 Citation Analysis of Basic Science Research Departments 71 5 Citation Analysis of Scientific Journals 91 Part 2.2 The ISI Citation Indexes 107 6 Basic Principles, Citation Links and Terminology 109 7 ISI Coverage by Discipline 119 8 Implications for the Use of the ISI Citation Indexes in Research Evaluation 137 Part 2.3 Assessing Social Sciences and Humanities 145 9 Differences between Science, Social Sciences and Humanities 147 10 Expanded Citation Analysis: A Case Study in Economics 153 11 A Case Study of Research Performance in Law 159 Part 2.4 Accuracy Aspects 167 12 Introductory Notes on Accuracy Issues 169 13 Accuracy of Citation Counts 173 14 Problems with the Names of Authors and Institutions, and with the Delimitation of Subfields 181 Part 2.5 Theoretical Aspects 191 15 What Do References and Citations Measure? 193 16 Towards a Theory of Citation: Some Building Blocks 209 17 Implications for the Use of Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation 221 Part 2.6 Citation Analysis and Peer Review 227 18 Peer Review and the Use and Validity of Citation Analysis 229 19 Analysis of Peer Assessments of Research Departments 239 20 Analysis of a National Research Council 247 Part 2.7 Macro Studies 259 21 Did Global Scientific Publication Productivity Increase during the 1980s and 1990s? 261 22 Measuring Trends in National Publication Output 271 23 Does International Scientific Collaboration Pay? 285 24 Do US Scientists Overcite Papers from their Own Country? 291 Part 2.8 New Developments 301 25 Development of New Indicators 303 26 Electronic Publishing, New Databases and Search Engines 313 27 Further Research 319 References 323 Index of Keywords, Cited Works and Cited Authors 337 From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Aug 17 04:40:48 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:43 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Free Access vs. Open Access Message-ID: Topic Thread Re-directed from "Jan Velterop and Springer" to: "Free Access vs. Open Access" (began August 2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3281.html [http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A1=ind03&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&F=l Georg Botz wrote: > May I add a little correction to Stevan's comment: > > Articles for which authors pay 3000 USD via "Open Choice" are *not* OA, but > can only be accessed without charge from the SpringerLink website. This is merely re-invoking the non-distinction between "free" and "open" access. What the research world wants and needs is: FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS ONLINE That is what it's all about. Once we have that, the rest comes with the territory. > Or, in Springer's own words: > "Copying, reproducing, distributing, or posting of the publisher's version > of the article on a third party server is not permitted." > (Quoted from "Open Choice Details" cf. www.springeronline.com/openchoice) Why does anyone need to copy, reproduce, (re-)distribute or (re-)post the the article on a third part server when the full text is freely, immediately and permanently accessible on SpringerLink? All one need copy, reproduce, distribute or post is the *URL*! The rest comes with the territory. > But nevertheless, Springer is a "green" publisher. It is indeed: as verdant as one could possibly wish. But that has nothing to do with Springer's Open Choice option, which is not about author self-archiving at all, and actually makes Springer semi-gold (gold being an OA publisher). Springer's squeeky-clean green status comes from its author self-archiving policy, which concerns authors self-posting their refereed final drafts on their own (second party) institutional servers. This too does not entail third-party re-publishing rights, and why should it? The full text already comes with the territory (the web), free for all. OA is still only at about 15% today. Please, let us not fuss about things we don't need when we still don't have what we want, and is 100% within our reach! Stevan Harnad > ---- > > > If I understand correctly, authors will still need to self-archive > > > their own final copy with Open Choice. This being the case - and there > > > being no difference in access - why would authors not save some money, > > > and simply self-archive?... > > > > No, this is incorrect. For authors who elect to pay for Open Choice, Springer > > archives the official published version of their article for them, in > > the Open Access sector of its own Archive, making the article OA webwide via > > SpringerLink, the publisher's online service. > > > > > ...a policy that asks authors to pay to give the entire world free access, > > > yet denies authors the right to deposit a copy in the repository of > > > their choice, is a tad absurd, isn't it? > > > > Springer does not deny authors the right to self-archive their own final > > drafts, whether or not they opt for Open Choice. Springer journals are > > among the over 90% of journals that have a "green" self-archiving policy. > > > > http://romeo.eprints.org/search.php?t=springer > > > > Open Choice is exactly what it says it is: a choice, i.e., an > > extra option. > > All Springer authors can choose to self-archive their final drafts without > > choosing to pay for Open Choice. > > > > 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 Sun Aug 21 21:04:09 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:44 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique Message-ID: ** Apologies for cross-posting ** This letter is co-signed by: Professor Tim Berners-Lee (University of Southampton) Professor Dave De Roure (University of Southampton) Professor Stevan Harnad (University of Southampton) Professor Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton) Professor Derek Law (University of Strathclyde) Dr. Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge) Professor Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University) Professor Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield) [ Note: A hyperlinked version of this letter is available at http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html and there is a longer, more detailed version at: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html ] Professor Ian Diamond Chair, RCUK Executive Group Research Councils UK Secretariat Polaris House , North Star Ave Swindon SN2 1ET Date: 22 August Dear Professor Diamond, We are responding to the public letter, addressed to yourself, by Sally Morris (Executive Director of ALPSP, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), concerning the RCUK's proposed research self-archiving policy. http://www.alpsp.org/news/rcuk/default.htm http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/statement.pdf ALPSP says that the RCUK policy would have 'disastrous consequences' for journals, yet all objective evidence is precisely contrary to this dire prediction. In the point-by-point rebuttal attached (below) to this letter, we document this on the basis of the actual data and a careful logical analysis. Here is a summary: ALPSP argues that a policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as OAI-PMH), "will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario". The disastrous scenario predicted by ALPSP is that an RCUK mandate would cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, which would in turn lead to the financial failure of scholarly journals, and so to the collapse of the quality control and peer review process that publishers manage. Not only are these claims unsubstantiated, but all the evidence to date shows the reverse to be true: not only do journals thrive and co-exist alongside author self-archiving, but they can actually benefit from it -- both in terms of more citations and more subscriptions. Moreover, there is a logical contradiction in the position adopted by ALPSP. On the one hand, ALPSP maintains that learned societies must be allowed to operate in a free market ("each publisher must have the right to establish the best way of expanding access to its journal content that is compatible with continuing viability"). Yet on the other hand, ALPSP is in effect asking RCUK to protect learned societies from the consequences of a free market -- specifically the right of those who have funded and produced research to make their product readily accessible for uptake by its intended users. What no one denies is that today many researchers are unable to access all the research they need to do their work. As ALPSP itself acknowledges, researchers already have to make use of author self-archived articles in order to gain access to "otherwise inaccessible published articles," since no research institution can afford to subscribe to all the journals its researchers need. In short, due to the current constraints on the accessibility of research results, the potential of British scholarship is not being maximised currently. Yet the constraints on accessibility can now, in the digital age, be eliminated completely, to the benefit of the UK economy and society, exactly in the way RCUK has proposed. For this reason, we believe that RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving mandate, without further delay. That done, RCUK can meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in sharing the newfound benefits of maximising UK research access and impact. (A point-by-point rebuttal is attached below. A longer analysis, signed also by some non-UK supporters, is at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alpsp.doc ) Yours faithfully, Professor Tim Berners-Lee (University of Southampton) Professor Dave De Roure (University of Southampton) Professor Stevan Harnad (University of Southampton) Professor Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton) Professor Derek Law (University of Strathclyde) Dr. Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge) Professor Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University) Professor Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Point-by-point rebuttal: > ALPSP: a policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles > in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready > retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as > Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such > as OAI-PMH), will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario. This hypothesis has already been tested and the actual evidence affords not the slightest hint of any 'move to a disastrous scenario.' Self-archiving is most advanced in physics, hence that is the strongest test of where it is moving: Since 1991, hundreds of thousands of articles have been made freely accessible and readily retrievable by physicists using the open archive called arXiv; those articles have been extensively accessed, retrieved, used and cited by other researchers exactly as their authors intended. Yet when asked, both of the large physics learned societies (the Institute of Physics Publishing in the UK and the American Physical Society) responded very explicitly that they cannot identify any loss of subscriptions to their journals as a result of this critical mass of self-archived and readily retrievable physics articles (footnote 1). > ALPSP: Librarians will increasingly find that 'good enough' versions > of a significant proportion of articles in journals are freely > available; in a situation where they lack the funds to purchase all > the content their users want, it is inconceivable that they would not > seek to save money by cancelling subscriptions to those journals. As > a result, those journals will die. First, neither research topics nor research journals have national boundaries. RCUK-funded researchers publish articles in thousands of journals, and those articles represent the output of only a small fraction of the world's research population. It is therefore extremely unlikely that a 'significant proportion' of the articles in any particular journal will become freely available as a consequence of the RCUK policy. Second, as we know, some physics journals already do contain a 'significant proportion' of articles that have been self-archived in the physics repository, arXiv -- yet librarians have not cancelled subscriptions: the journals continue to survive and thrive. > ALPSP: The consequences of the destruction of journals' viability > are very serious. Not only will it become impossible to support > the whole process of quality control, including (but not limited to) > peer review, but in addition, the research community will lose all > the other value and prestige which is added, for both author and > reader, through inclusion in a highly rated journal with a clearly > understood audience and rich online functionality Wherever authors and readers value the rich online functionality added by publishers they will still wish to have access to the journal, either through personal subscriptions or through their libraries. This is obviously the case for the physics journals. Publishers who add significant value create a product that users and their institutions will pay for. Researchers who cannot access the journal version, however -- because their institutions 'lack the funds to purchase all the content their users want' -- should not be denied access to the basic research results, which have always been given away for free by their authors (to their publishers, as well as to all requesters of reprints). Nor should those authors be denied the usage and impact of those users. Such limitations on access have always hampered the impact and progress of British scholarship. > ALPSP: We absolutely reject unsupported assertions that self-archiving > in publicly accessible repositories does not and will not damage > journals. Indeed, we are accumulating a growing body of evidence > that the opposite is the case, even at this early stage. For example: > [1] Increasingly, librarians are making use of COUNTER-compliant > (and therefore comparable) usage statistics to guide their decisions > to renew or cancel journals. The Institute of Physics Publishing is > therefore concerned to see that article downloads from its site are > significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially > replicated in the ArXiV repository than for those which are not. And what is the evidence supporting the assertion that 'the opposite is the case' and journals are damaged? None. As we know, the Institute of Physics Publishing (like the American Physical Society) has already stated publicly that it cannot identify any loss of subscriptions as a result of 14 years of self-archiving by physicists (footnote 1). Moreover, institutional repository software developers are now working with publishers on ways to ensure that the usage of articles in repositories is credited to the publisher. > ALPSP: [2] Citation statistics and the resultant impact factors > are of enormous importance to authors and their institutions; they > also influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. Both > the Institute of Physics and the London Mathematical Society are > therefore troubled to note an increasing tendency for authors to > cite only the repository version of an article, without mentioning > the journal in which it was later published. Librarians' decisions to cancel or subscribe to journals are made on the basis of a variety of measures, citation statistics being just one of them (footnote 2). But self-archiving increases citations, so journals carrying self-archived articles will perform better under this measure. Citing the canonical version of an article wherever possible is a matter of author best-practice; it is misleading to cite momentary lags in scholarliness as if they were an argument against self-archiving. All of this can and will be quite easily and naturally adjusted, partly through updated scholarly practice and partly through institutional and publisher repositories collaborating in a system of pooled and shared citation statistics -- all credited to the official published version, as proper scholarliness dictates. These are all just natural adaptations to the new medium. > ALPSP: [3] Evidence is also growing that free availability of content > has a very rapid negative effect on subscriptions. Oxford University > Press made the contents of Nucleic Acids Research freely available > online six months after publication; subscription loss was much > greater than in related journals where the content was free after > a year... > [4] The BMJ Publishing Group has noted a similar effect... > [5] In the USA, the Institute for Operations Research and the > Management Sciences ... made freely available on the Web... noted > a subscriptions decline In all three examples whole journals were made freely available, in their entirety, with all the added value and rich online functionality that a journal provides. This is not at all the same as the self-archiving of authors' drafts, which are simply the basic research results, provided by the author on a single-article basis. The latter, not the former, is the target of the proposed RCUK policy. It is hence highly misleading to cite the effects of the former as evidence of negative effects of the latter. (And although the RCUK is not proposing to mandate whole-journal open access, it is worth noting that there is also plenty of evidence that journals have benefited from being made freely available: Molecular Biology of the Cell's (MBC's) subscriptions have grown steadily after free access was provided by its publisher, The American Society for Cell Biology (footnote 3). MBC also enjoys a high impact factor and healthy submissions by authors encouraged by the increased exposure their articles receive. The same has happened for journals published by other societies [footnote 4].) > ALPSP: In addition, it is increasingly clear that this is exactly > how researchers are already using search engines such as Scirus > and Google Scholar... 'At this point, my main use of both [Scirus > and Google Scholar] is for finding free Web versions of otherwise > inaccessible published articles... Both Scirus and Scholar were > also useful for finding author-hosted article copies, preprints, > e-prints, and other permutations of the same article.' Scirus, Google Scholar and the other search engines that retrieve open access articles serve the research community by enabling researchers to find and access articles they would otherwise be unable to read because they are hidden behind subscription barriers. These services help to maximise research access, usage and impact, all to the benefit of British science and scholarship, exactly as their authors and their institutions and funders wish them to do. > ALPSP: In the light of this growing evidence of serious and > irreversible damage, each publisher must have the right to establish > the best way of expanding access to its journal content that is > compatible with continuing viability. So far no evidence of serious and irreversible damage inflicted by self-archiving has been presented by ALPSP. This is unsurprising, because none exists. Publishers should do what they can to expand access and remain viable. But they certainly have no right to prevent researchers, their institutions and their funders from expanding access to their research findings either -- nor to expect them to wait and see whether their publishers will one day maximise access for them. > ALPSP: This is not best achieved by mandating the earliest possible > self-archiving, and thus forcing the adoption of untried and uncosted > publishing practices. Self-archiving -- and what the RCUK is mandating -- is not a publishing practice at all: it is an author practice. And it has been tried and tested -- with great success -- for over 15 years without 'forcing the adoption' of any 'untried and uncosted publishing practices.' What UK research needs now is more self-archiving, not more delay and counterfactual projections. > ALPSP: This in turn will deprive learned societies of an important > income stream, without which many will be unable to support their > other activities -- such as meetings, bursaries, research funding, > public education and patient information -- which are of huge benefit > both to their research communities and to the general public. Please contrast this double-doomsday scenario ('self-archiving will not only destroy journals but all the other good works of learned societies') with the following quote from Dr Elizabeth Marincola, Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology, a sizeable but not huge society (10,000 members; many US scientific and medical societies have over 100,000): "I think the more dependent societies are on their publications, the farther away they are from the real needs of their members. If they were really doing good work and their members were aware of this, then they wouldn't be so fearful...... When my colleagues come to me and say they couldn't possibly think of putting their publishing revenues at risk, I think 'why haven't you been diversifying your revenue sources all along and why haven't you been diversifying your products all along?' The ASCB offers a diverse range of products so that if publications were at risk financially, we wouldn't lose our membership base because there are lots of other reasons why people are members." (footnote 3) This perfectly encapsulates why we should not be taking too seriously the dire warnings from those learned societies who warn that self-archiving will damage research and its dissemination. The dissemination of research findings should be a high-priority service for learned societies, but not a commercial end-in-itself that generates profit to subsidise other activities, at the expense of British research itself. RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving mandate, without any further delay, and then meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in pooling download and citation statistics, and in other other ways of sharing the benefits of maximising UK research access and impact. References 1. Swan, A (2004). American Scientist Open Access Forum 3 February, 2005 2. Personal communication from a UK University Library Director: 'I know of no HE library where librarians make cancellation or subscription decisions. Typically they say to the department/faculty 'We have to save ?X,000" from your share of the serials budget, what do you want to cut?'. These are seen as academic -- not metrics-driven -- judgements, and no librarian makes those academic judgements, as they are indefensible in Senate... [S]uch decisions are almost always wholly subjective, not objective, and have nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of repositories.' 3. The society lady: an interview with Elizabeth Marincola (2003) Open Access Now, October 6, 2003 4. Walker, T (2002) Two societies show how to profit by providing free access. Learned Publishing 15, 279-284. Copies also sent to: The Lord Sainsbury of Turville Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Science and Innovation Department of Trade and Industry Professor Sir Keith O'Nions Director General of Research Councils, Office of Science and Technology Dr. Astrid Wissenburg, RCUK Secretariat Professor Colin Blakemore, Medical Research Council Frances Marsden, Arts and Humanities Research Council Professor Julia Goodfellow, Biotechnology and Biological Research Council Professor Richard Wade, Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council Professor Alan Thorpe, Natural Environment Research Council Professor John O'Reilly, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Professor John Wood, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils Andrea Powell, Chair of ALPSP Council (Director of Publishing, CAB International) From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Aug 22 16:07:58 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:44 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] SSHRC Open Access Consultation (Canada) Message-ID: I have been asked to advertise widely the following survey on Open Access by the Canadian research funder, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC): http://www.sshrc.ca/web/whatsnew/initiatives/open_access/index_e.asp I am happy to do so, but not without advertising my own replies, which contain an implicit critique of the confused and confusing way in which some of the questions are being asked: > Consultation on Open Access: Questions > > SSHRC formally adopted the principle of open access at > the October 2004 meeting of its governing council. Please define the "principle of open access" to make sure we are referring to the same thing. To me it means making the full-text of peer-reviewed research freely accessible on the web. > However, questions remain about how to make this principle > operational, how to revise current research > dissemination and communication policies, and how to > reshape research support programs to meet the needs > of researchers within this new policy context. Only one simple revision is needed, and the Research Councils UK are already about to do it: Require the full-text of all peer-reviewed research resulting from SSHRC-funded research to be made freely accessible on the web: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm > Policy Questions > > SSHRC requests your advice on the following general > policy issues: > > Should SSHRC adopt a regulation requiring that one > copy of all research results be deposited in an > institutional repository? Yes, definitely -- and immediately upon acceptance for publication, not 3, 6, 12 months or longer after publication; any embargo on research findings is a gratuitous embargo on research usage, progress and impact, with no research-based justification whatsoever. > Should such a regulation apply to all forms of > research outputs (i.e. peer-reviewed journal articles, > non-peer reviewed research reports, monographs, > data sets, theses, conference proceedings, etc.)? All those that the author would otherwise have made public and would not have sought revenue for its sale. SSHRC cannot and should not try to force authors to make public what they do not wish to make public (or wish to make public only to sell), but SSHRC *can* certainly make publication of the findings a condition for funding the research ("publish or perish"). > Should there be exceptions for research outputs where > there is an expectation of financial return to the author (i.e., > monographs where royalties are accrued)? Yes, definitely. One step at a time! 85% of the refereed literature is still not freely accessible online, and there the case for it is incontrovertible, because it is all an author give-away, written solely for research usage and impact. This is not the time to get bogged down in gray areas: Encourage making monographs freely accessible online, but don't *require* it, and certainly not now, before the primary target itself (peer-reviewed research) has been made 100% freely accessible. > Operational Questions > > In general, there are two accepted routes to open access: > > Self-archiving - depositing research results and > materials in institutional repositories that can be > searched by anyone with Internet access; and, > Open access electronic journals - peer-reviewed > journals that provide Internet-based access for readers > without subscription charges. > > Both routes present SSHRC and the research > community with operational challenges: > > Institutional repositories: Building a management > and service platform This presents no "operational challenge." SSHRC need do nothing except provide a backup repository of its own for those researchers who don't yet have an institutional archive. It costs $2000 plus 3 days sysad set-up time and 3 days a year sysad maintenance time to for an institution or SSHRC to create and maintain an archive. The rest is just getting the researchers to do the keystrokes required to deposit their contents in it. http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 > Currently, not all Canadian universities provide an > institutional repository service. Some 26 repositories > are now in place, or are in development, but this does > not yet provide the necessary services for all SSHRC-funded > researchers. What is missing is not repositories (which, as noted, are cheap and trivial to create and maintain). What is missing is *policies* requiring that they be filled. The 26 Canadian repositories are near empty (relative to their own annual research output).. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all&type=&version=&country=ca They are not missing dollars, they are missing keystrokes, and the keystrokes need to be required - by the SSHRC, amongst others. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php > If required by SSHRC, would you be willing to send all > outputs from SSHRC-funded research to an institutional > repository? Yes, I already do. And two international JISC studies confirm that 81% of researchers would deposit willingly if required by their employer and/or funder (14% more would comply reluctantly, and only 5% would not comply) : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ And the results from the (only) two institutions so far that already have required self-archiving (Southampton ECS and CERN) confirm this, with >90% compliance in both. http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php > What range of electronic publications and institutional > repository services are needed to fully meet the needs of > the scholarly community? See, for example ?rudit.org > (www.erudit.org), a Quebec-based electronic service > provider. Should this model be extended across Canada? Why is the question of providing institutional repository services (which costs little, especially per paper, and requires only an SSHRC policy) being conflated with the question of providing electronic publications? Most journals have an electronic edition these days, but very few journals are freely accessible (about 5% of journals are). The cost per paper of publishing in that 5% of journals may vary from $500-$3000 per paper, if they are not subscription-based. And subsidising the journals may cost even more. But why are these questions being mixed up with the (minimal) cost of SSHRC-required self-archiving, which can already generate > 90% compliance? > Open access journals: Revising the SSHRC Aid to > Research and Transfer Journals Program > > Although SSHRC financially supports the majority of social > science and humanities journals produced in Canada, the Aid to > Research and Transfer Journals Program does not provide support > for non-subscription based journals. It's not clear why SSHRC supports any journals, but surely if they do, they should want them to be as widely accessible as possible? > Scholarly peer-reviewed journals play a crucial role in > the certification of research knowledge. In the context of > open access, institutional repositories must be able to > distinguish between peer-reviewed and non-> peer-reviewed > research outputs. Therefore, the continued existence, and > financial viability, of journals is clearly a critical > issue. Again, one has nothing to do with the other! SSHRC-mandated self-archiving is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles. Self-archiving has not generated any subscription cancellations, even in the fields (e.g., physics) where it is most advanced and has been going on longest. Why are the issues of self-archiving (and its minimal costs) and journal publishing (and its costs) being conflated here? http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html > Please comment on each of the three following possible > ways to tackle this challenge, taking into consideration > the fact that there are limited resources for the support > of research: > > A "moving wall" system where journal articles are > available only by subscription for the first six > months, and then made available free of charge. An awful system, throwing away 6 months of research usage, progress and impact for no reason whatsoever. http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A1=ind05&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&F=l#137 > A publication fee, charged by journals to authors, > to be considered an eligible expense within a SSHRC > research grant. This would require researchers to > have access to SSHRC or other grant funds. Fine, but this is the solution only to the problem of Open Access for a small percentage of Canadian research output -- the output that is published in Open Access journals (including the SSHRC-subsidised ones, if SSHRC decides to go this route). What percentage of Canadian research output do you think that covers? In the world, 5% of journals are currently OA. In addition, about 15% of research output is already self-archived spontaneously by its authors. That leaves 80% of research output still to be accounted for -- and only a self-archiving mandate can take care of that. > A modification to the SSHRC support program for > journals -- which currently covers 40 to 50 per cent of > journal expenditures?to allow grants to cover all > peer review, administration and manuscript > preparation costs, but not costs associated with > distribution. These are minor details, concerning perhaps 20% of Canadian SSHRC research output. What about the other 80%, published in international journals, not OA journals, and not supported by SSHRC? (Like worrying about monographs, this too is the tail wagging the dog: Focus on the 80% of Canadian SSHRC research output that this does not cover!) > As journal editors, do you allow your contributing authors > to place their accepted articles in an institutional > repository or on a Web site not connected with the > journal? Why, or why not? As a Cambridge University Press journal editor (of Behavioral and Brain Sciences) for 25 years, I certainly did (from the moment the Net came into existence) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/bbs.valedict.html And over 90% of journals worldwide now do too: http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php That's not the point either. The problem is not the lack of journal policy allowing it, but the lack of institution/funder policy requiring it. > As researchers/authors, would you be willing to comply > with a SSHRC regulation that requires peer-reviewed > articles to be published in an open access journal and/or > placed in a publicly-accessible > institutional repository? Did you not just ask half this question already above? "If required by SSHRC, would you be willing to send all outputs from SSHRC-funded research to an institutional repository?" You are now asking it in an illogical and/or form (worthy of a dodgy secession referendum!) : If you ask me separately whether I or any other author would tolerate being required to publish in any journal other than the one I judge optimal for my work, the answer is definitely not. Why conflate an open-and-shut yes-question with an open-and-shut no question? Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Aug 23 10:01:34 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:44 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > There's a difference between 'refute' (= produce evidence to disprove) and > 'rebut' (= argue against). Stevan's letter does the latter, not the > former; there is no evidence whatever that self-archiving will not damage > journals or those who produce them (Umm, first, that's Berners-Lee et al's letter, not Stevan's letter...;>) Second, there is no evidence to refute Creationism either: Just no evidence *for* it, and all existing evidence *against* it (in both cases). So one can only rebut, not refute, in both cases. I suggest that Sally look into the logic of hypothesis-testing and empirical inference. One does not, in the real empirical world, say "I conjecture, and you cannot refute": Refutation (disproof) is only possible in mathematics -- by proving that something is logically impossible, self-contradictory. For anything else that is not logically impossible, we seek not refutation but supporting or contrary evidence. For the proposition "Self-archiving will ruin journals" (or even that it will reduce subscriptions) there is no supporting evidence to date, and all evidence to date is to the contrary: that self-archiving is neither ruining journals nor even reducing their subscriptions. Sally would do well to look at "Pascal's Wager" (as I have urged her to do before): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4211.html Pascal thought that it was more rational to behave *as-if* the Creed (that there is an afterlife, with eternal damnation for nonbelievers) were true, because the costs of behaving as if the Creed were false if it was in fact true (eternal damnation) were so much greater than the costs of behaving as if the Creed were true even if it was in fact false (leading a slightly more constrained but finite life). What Pascal missed was that the force of this unassailable logic came from one unquestioned but questionable premise: The (arbitrary) threat of eternal damnation, merely on the Prophets' say-so. It was the direness of the purported consequences that made the logic look unassailable. (Any rival Prophet could have raised the Wager by promising even more dire consequences [e.g., one's soul splitting into an infinity of sub-souls, all suffering one another's anguish for an eternity of cardinality Aleph-1, where each instant lasts an eternity] if one fails to behave according to *that* Creed, and so on.) What this shows is that one does not make a point by just positing the dire consequences that would ensue if one does not take the point. I, for my part, am not prophecying ruin for research if researchers fail to self-archive. I am merely demonstrating exactly what they are actually losing, daily, monthly, yearly, as long as they don't: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif Sally should give up the Doomsday business too... Stevan Harnad > 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: "Peter Suber" > > To: "SPARC Open Access Forum" > Sent: Monday, August 22, 2005 2:22 PM > Subject: [SOAF] Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving > > > [Forwarding from the University of Southampton. --Peter.] > > > News from the University of Southampton > > Ref: 05/155 22 August 2005 > > Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving > ------------------------------------------------------------- > > Academics from some of the UK's top universities are giving public support > to the UK Research Councils' (RCUK) proposed self-archiving policy. > > The academics, who include inventor of the World Wide Web, University of > Southampton Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, have co-signed a document > refuting claims made by the Association of Learned and Professional Society > Publishers (ALPSP) that the RCUK policy would have 'disastrous consequences' > for journals. > > The claims were made in a letter from ALPSP to RCUK in response to the > RCUK's position statement on Access to Research Outputs issued in June. > > The rebuttal document, which has been signed by representatives from the > universities of Southampton, Cambridge, Loughborough, Sheffield and > Strathclyde and will be sent to RCUK by the end of the month, details the > reasons why ALPSP's claims are unsubstantiated, not least because evidence > has shown that not only can journals co-exist and thrive alongside author > self-archiving, they can actually benefit from it. > > Authors, institutions, funders and publishers benefit from the increased > visibility, use and impact of research articles that are self-archived and > freely available to all. > > In a covering letter to Professor Ian Diamond, Chair of the RCUK Executive > Group, the academics state: 'We believe that RCUK should go ahead and > implement its immediate self-archiving mandate, without further delay. That > done, RCUK can meet ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan > how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and > their publishers in sharing the new-found benefits of maximising UK research > access and impact.' > > Ends > > Notes to Editors: > > 1. RCUK draft policy proposal: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp > > ALPSP critique of RCUK proposal: http://www.alpsp.org/news/rcuk/default.htm > > Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique: > http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html > > Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and > Fruitful Collaboration: > http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html > > 2. The University of Southampton is the home of GNU EPrints software, > the most widely used software for building Institutional Repositories, and > the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) TARDis (Targeting > Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure) project, which has been > investigating the technical, cultural and academic issues which surround > institutional repositories. > > 3. The University of Southampton is a leading UK teaching and research > institution with a global reputation for leading-edge research and > scholarship. The University has over 20,000 students and over 5000 staff. > Its annual turnover is in the region of ?270 million. > > For further information: > > Professor Stevan Harnad, School of Electronics and Computer Science, > Tel: 023 8059 2582, email: harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk > > Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, Electronics and Computer Science, > University of Southampton, Tel: 023 8059 5453, email: > j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk > > --------------------------------- > > Sue Wilson > Press & PR Officer > Media Relations > University of Southampton > Highfield > Southampton SO17 1BJ > > > ========== > > This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to > The SPARC Open Access Forum. > To post, send your message to . > To unsubscribe, email to . > To switch to digest mode, email to . > To switch to index mode, email to . > Send administrative queries to . > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Aug 23 13:04:38 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:44 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving In-Reply-To: <5344E13A4CE26C4E9E8F192769D7FCF033326E@UNRX.unr.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Rick Anderson wrote: > If authors could be counted on consistently to self-archive when given the > option of doing so, and if it were easier to find self-archived articles > on the Web, then I would be much more optimistic about self-archiving > as a viable alternative to traditional journal publishing. For now, > though, it looks to me like traditional publishers still add quite a > bit of value to the content they publish. > > Rick Anderson > Dir. of Resource Acquisition > University of Nevada, Reno Libraries If ever evidence was needed of the near-total disconnect between the library community's and the research community's interest in OA, surely this is it! Self-archiving is not intended as "a viable alternative to traditional journal publishing." It is intended as a *supplement* to it, for those would-be users who have no "viable alternative" for accessing content they cannot afford. Necessity is the mother of invention. Moreover, the purpose of the RCUK policy -- being rapidly lost in this welter of increasingly irrelevant posting on everything but the issue at hand -- is to ensure that "authors could be counted on consistently to self-archive". Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Aug 23 12:26:48 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:44 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving In-Reply-To: <007d01c5a7f8$9123d5e0$d95d7d9e@lboro.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, J.F.B.Rowland wrote: > I think Sally Morris is on somewhat stronger ground than Stevan alleges - It would be useful if Fytton made it clear in precisely what this "somewhat stronger ground consists." It is not clear whether he has read the two rebuttals in question: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html A quick summary is this: Sally hypothesises that the RCUK Self-Archiving Policy would lead to the (strong version) "destruction of journals" and/or (weak version) "negative effect on subscriptions." Sally provides no evidence whatsoever in support of this (either version). (She cites 5 examples, 3 of them having nothing at all to do with self-archiving -- concerning only journals that make their contents free online; plus 2 examples having to do with author citation and usage statistics, both of which can and will be easily and naturally adapted to the new medium, hence have no implications one way or the other.) All actual evidence is contrary to both the strong and weak versions of Sally's hypothesis: Self-archiving has been co-existing peacefully with journal publication for 15 years now. And even in areas where it has been practised the longest (physics) and approaches 100% in some fields, the journals report no cancellations associated with self-archiving. Fytton is not providing any further evidence here, for or against the hypothesis (either the strong or the weak version). He is merely stating that he too holds the hypothesis. But there's no more accounting for hypotheses than for tastes, in the absence of any supporting evidence, and in the presence of nothing but contrary evidence. > although the suggestion that widespread use of OA repositories will > ultimately harm the subscription sales of journals is only a prediction, it > is a fairly logical one. If an item can be obtained free of charge, for how > long will people go on buying it? If every prediction that was not in contradiction with logic were provisionally taken to be true, Doomsday Prophecies would indeed rule. The question is not whether the prediction is contrary to logic but whether it is contrary to the evidence: And it is contrary to all the evidence to date. The rest is speculation: Why do libraries still subscribe? Here are a couple of logical speculations: (1) They still want the print edition (2) They want the publisher's value-added online edition, not just the author's self-archived final draft. Probably there are more one can think of. But note that they are all speculations about the reasons why the destruction/cancellation speculation is *not* supported by any evidence. In other words, they are merely counter-speculations. But why are we speculating and counter-speculating, when one body of evidence is substantial and irrefutable: Self-archiving increases research usage and impact dramatically. That is extremely good for research. And there is no sign of its being bad for publication either. So RCUK is taking the logical step of increasing self-archiving, so as to increase research usage and impact, and Sally and Fytton are instead just speculating. > On the other hand, it seems likely that any such effect will occur gradually > over a period of years. Which effect? We have different effects in mind. I am thinking of the *demonstrated* effect of self-archiving: increased usage and impact, a face-valid benefit for research and researchers. Sally and Fytton are instead thinking about an *undemonstrated* negative effect of self-archiving: increased journal cancellations, And the net result is that a hypothetical, undemonstrated negative effect (for publishers) is being taken (by Sally, perhaps not Fytton) as grounds for delaying or derailing a real, demonstrated positive effect (for researchers). Let us hope that the RCUK will not be persuaded by such logic. > This gives all parties concerned time to adapt. The RCUK immediate-self-archiving policy needs to be adopted immediately. Whether or not there is something that publishers will need to adapt will be seen if and when there are any signs of it. Right now, there are none. > OUP and Springer are each starting to do so Fytton is again changing the subject: OUP and Springer are experimenting with making their journals free online, or with giving their authors the option to pay them to make the journal version of their articles free online for them. That is an adaptation, to be sure, but it is not an adaptation to the effects of self-archiving (of which there are none, insofar as journal renewals and economics are concerned). There are also logical things one could say about these experiments, but never mind: let 1000 flowers bloom. The only thing about OUP and Springer policy that is remotely pertinent to self-archiving is that Springer is full-green (green light to self-archive both postprint and preprint) and OUP is only pale-green (green light only for preprint). http://romeo.eprints.org/ That's not tragic: There's plenty of wiggle room in what counts as the "preprint" -- and, at bottom, authors don't really need their publishers' blessing to self-archive their own drafts; it's just a sop for the timorous and the pedantic. But the point is that self-archiving is the green road to OA, and what OUP and Springer are experimenting with is the golden road, which is perfectly fine (though probably premature). > and Bo-Christer Bjork from Finland has also recently made a proposal for > transitional arrangements that look as if they could work (see > http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=event_international_0605#Spks). One can speculate about hypothetical transition scenarios -- and I have not been un-guilty of doing a spot of that myself, in my more naive past -- but it is now clear that among the many things that have been needlessly delaying the optimal and inevitable -- 100% OA -- was this constant predilection for counterfactual speculation while ignoring and failing to act upon the actual facts on the ground. So, for now, I declare, with Newton (and for the sake of research progress): Hypotheses non fingo. > There are potentially greater problems for learned society publishers, for whom > Sally speaks, than for larger publishers. I think the research community would do better to deal with its actual problem of needless research impact loss, rather than subordinating it to publishers' hypothetical/potential/maybe problems -- whether the publishers be commercial ones or those that are *nominally* closer to the research community, the learned society publishers (though one wonders, sometimes!). > A current JISC-funded project being undertaken by Mary Waltham is > investigating possible future business models for them; I look forward > with interest to reading her report. It is splendid to be working on possible future business models for publishers, but you will forgive me for being far more concerned about the actual impact loss for research and researchers, today... http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Aug 23 16:20:30 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:45 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving Message-ID: On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 Jean-Claude =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Gu=E9don? wrote: > one may puzzle as to why, when so many articles are already available > in open access, the rate of use is so low. It is not clear what it was in Michael Kurtz's posting (to which the above posting is a reply) that gave Jean-Claude the impression that the rate of use of the self-archived versions of Astrophysics articles is low! Michael's point was not that the usage of self-archived drafts is low, but that the self-archiving co-exists peacefully with the published journal version. If Jean-Claude thinks the usage is low, he should just look at the weekly download statistics of, say, the US mirror of arxiv: http://arxiv.org/todays_stats Better still, look at Tim Brody's download data for Astrophysics in citebase, ranking hits by the number of times they were downloaded (for the UK mirror of arxiv alone) http://citebase.eprints.org/ or in Tim's download/citation correlator/predictor, which will show a good-sized correlation between downloads and citations in Astrophysics, again despite the fact that the correlations are based only on UK downloads rather than including US downloads (as they should -- and I hope soon will, thanks again to Michael Kurtz): http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10713/ And most important of all, see Tim's data on the 114% citation impact advantage for those articles that have been self-archived in Astronomy & Astrophysics compared to those that have not (check "Astronomy & Astrophysics" and then click "SHOW"): http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ It is that impact advantage -- which has now been replicated across all disciplines tested to date, by Chawki Hajjem http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm -- that is the most fundamental indication of the fact that self-archiving increases usage, for the only difference involved is whether the articles (compared within the same journal and year) do or do not have a self-archived version, freely accessible to all would-be users. The "rate of use is so low"? What is Jean-Claude thinking? There is one interesting anomaly, however, unique to Astrophysics, and it has been discussed before in this Forum: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3506.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4063.html Astro is unique in being: (1) a relatively circumscribed community worldwide, mostly located only at the well-funded universities (perhaps because of the resource-intensiveness of the research?), (2) having a relatively small, "closed" literature, involving a small specific set of journals in which all the relevant papers and citations appear. As a consequence (3) virtually all astrophysicists have institutional site-licensed access (i.e., for-fee) to the entire astrophysics literature, as confirmed by Tim Brody's finding that (unlike all other fields of physics, and unlike all other disciplines) (4) astrophysicists self-archive only their unrefereed preprints, to get them out early (like other physicists); they do not bother to self-archive their postprints, knowing that they will all be available to everyone for-fee (as Peter Boyce of ASA has been telling me for years). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2873.html So the fact that there is *still* an OA citation advantage in Astro, despite all these factors conspiring against it, is of especial interest. Michael Kurtz has published a good deal on this topic too: Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Demleitner, M., Murray, S. S., Martimbeau, N. and Elwell, B. (2003b) The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Sociology, Bibliometrics, and Impact Author eprint, March 2003, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasis-abstract.html Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C. S., Demleitner, M., Murray, S. S. (2004b) The Effect of Use and Access on Citations Author eprint, September 2004, Information Processing and Management http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/IPM-abstract.html > One may also wonder, in the light of [Kurtz's Astrophysics] data > whether mandating authors to deposit their articles in OA depositories > would be enough to ensure the success of open access. One can only wonder what Jean-Claude is thinking, and why! All the evidence is that even in Astro there is both a usage and a citation advantage for self-archived papers, just as there are in every other field. What is true is that it is not Astro (with its 100% de-facto OA owing to the special factors listed above) that urgently needs the self-archiving mandate, but all the other disciplines! > [Kurtz's Astrophysics' figures show that even when depositories (or > even, in this case, just one depository) contain a very significant > majority of papers in a particular field, this is still not sufficient > to encourage actual use. They show nothing of the sort. They show that self-archived papers still get downloaded and cited more, even in Astro! > if such figures were to be multiplied across a significant number > of disciplines, one could begin to ask whether all the efforts for > OA repositories are worth it given the benign neglect they seem to > generate. Supplement to what end, if use remains low? There is no benign neglect in terms of usage or citation: The benign neglect is in the failure to do the self-archiving -- and that's what the mandate is the remedy for. (Please note that once the mandate is 100% successful, there will no longer be a self-archiving advantage, because all articles will be self-archived. Not even Astro is there yet.) Supplement to what end? To start enjoying the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact that is still being needlessly lost toady and has been needlessly (and cumulatively) lost for years: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif > if we limit ourselves to OA, OAI-PMH compliant, depositories, and > with mandating, we will still not be where we want to be. If OA... -- > i.e. as complement and strictly nothing more - is not being used > very widely, then what is the point? We do want actual use, don't we? (1) Where we want to be is with 100% of research articles accessible to 100% of their would-be users, webwide. With 100% self-archiving, we would be there. And that is the point. (2) It is only Jean-Claude who thinks self-archived content is not being used very widely -- in particular, much more widely than non-self-archived content -- and I think I have already diagnosed why: Because Jean-Claude is in the thrall of a *theory* -- a theory not about how research can be made 100% accessible to 100% of its would-be users webwide, but a theory about how to "reform" the publishing system. This is what makes him blind to the true benefits (for researchers and research!) of OA. Jean-Claude is not really interested in OA -- only in OA publishing. For a critique of Jean-Claude's theory, please see: Harnad, S. (2005) Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold. Ariadne 43. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10675/01/index.html Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Aug 23 17:59:43 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:45 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, adam hodgkin wrote: > I don't see why the proponents of OA should mind recognising that the > technology of OA (the internet au fond) is a disruptive technology and will > change economic behaviour of libraries, publishers and researchers. That is > indeed part of the point. The RCUK policy is not intended to change the behaviour of libraries and publishers. It is intended to change the behaviours of researchers -- and not their *economic* behaviour, just their *ergonomic" (keystroking) behaviour (or that of their designees). And the only "economics" in any of this is the economics of research usage and impact, and the role those play in research progress and researchers' careers, salaries and funding. This pure research issue -- something between researchers and their fellow-researchers, not the library or publishing community -- has been conflated with pricing and publishing issues for long enough. It is sinking from the weight! Forget about publishing models and ensure that every UK researcher maximises the usage and impact of his own research by self-archiving a draft in his own institutional repository, exactly as the RCUK is proposing. > It is odd that we should be arguing that there is no sure fire proof that > behaviour will change, when we fully expect that behaviour should change and > IS changing the way things are done. The behaviour that can and will and should change is keystroking -- and the research usage and access that results from it. But forget about all this irrelevant (and disruptive) talk about economic behaviour and publishing! > All sides can also agree that the continuing provision of quality control by > editors and referees is also important. This is something no one wants to > lose and provides a continuing rationale for the role of the publisher. The RCUK policy is to self-archive *peer-reviewed* research -- the final draft that has been revised and accepted for *publication*. The RCUK has not proposed scuttling peer review or publication; indeed, those are part of the definition of the target corpus for OA self-archiving. Let us not box shadows of our own invention. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Aug 23 17:34:02 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:45 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > I don't think it's at all true that publishers are actively fighting Open > Access. A very large number of our members, and others, are experimenting > with different forms of OA publishing, including Delayed Open Access. Dunno about HM's plaint but mine is with the fact that in the ALPSP open letters to RCUK you are actively fighting Open Access Self-Archiving -- which plaint (before you say it) is not answered or even addressed by reminding me that many ALPSP publishers are green on Self-Archiving. To give a green light to do something and then actively fight to prevent that something's being done is (at best) a symptom of a touch of ambivalence! And (before you say it) it will not do to say "We are not trying to prevent, just to defer, so as to discuss": Publishers have had their say now (and they just keep saying the same thing over and over, with no new evidence) since the 1999 Varmus proposal, since the 2003 UK Select Committee Call, the 2003 NIH Call, and now the RCUK Call. This is a filibuster, not information exchange, and I very much hope the RCUK will not allow itself to be dragged into yet another round of it. Nor will it do to try to trade off the experiments with OA publishing by way of discharging the debt for actively fighting OA Self Archiving. They're not the same, and they trade in different currency (gold and green). And Delayed Access is no more Open Access than Paid Access is. Research is funded and conducted and reported in order to be used, immediately, by all would-be users, including those who cannot afford paid access, not in order to be embargoed from the latter -- for 3, 6, 12 months -- in order to allay publisher fears about "dire consequences" for which there does not exist a shred of evidence. > the research on OA journal publishing that we, AAAS and HighWire have > commissioned from Kaufman WIlls Associates is absolutely rigorous. I don't doubt it. Equally rigorous is all the research that wants to be made accessible to all its would-be users, immediately after it has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication (and often even before). What is urgently needed now is OA to all research -- not more research on OA journal publishing, and more delay. > What many of us are 'fighting', though, is any move which we think is > logically likely to damage the business model we have got, before it has > been satisfactorily established whether or not there is a better one! Please carry on with researching your business model; and stay in touch. But meanwhile, let the research community carry on with self-archiving our own research output. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Aug 24 04:22:44 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:45 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving In-Reply-To: <002d01c5a887$84721ed0$d95d7d9e@lboro.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, J.F.B.Rowland wrote: > Let me clarify my position. I am partisan *for* OA repositories, I fully > support the RCUK statement and the leading academics' open letter... > ...Stevan says "Why plan for a transition to something that may not happen?" > Answer: managements are supposed to plan for contingencies that may adversely > effect their organisations' business! I didn't say let's not plan (for whatever). I said let's not defer or derail (or use "planning" as a pretext for deferring) the already too long-deferred RCUK policy, slated for adoption end-August and implementation in October. And I am a partisan of learned societies too: But not when they try to delay, defer or derail the optimal and inevitable for research and researchers. Our Open Letter closed with: "For this reason, we believe that RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving mandate, without further delay. That done, RCUK can meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and *plan* [emphasis added] how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in sharing the newfound benefits of maximising UK research access and impact." http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Aug 24 15:28:03 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:45 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] On Supplements, Substitutes, and King Solomon In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ON SUPPLEMENTS, SUBSTITUTES AND KING SOLOMON Or: Publishers Will Be Publishers Not to put too melodramatic a turn on it, but Matt Cockerill's comment below, from BioMed Central Inc., OA Publishers, does put one in mind of the custody battle between the two maternal wannabes in the biblical tale: Who is the true parent of the (OA) infant? who really cares about its welfare, rather than about something else? But I think a more charitable interpretation is probably closer to the truth, since there continues to be so much confusion about OA, even in the minds of its champions: Matt has been so taken in by an abstract (and arid) definition of OA that he has lost sight of what it's all for, what it's about, what the malady is for which it is meant to be the cure. So I will have to remind Matt -- and anyone else who has lost sight of it, in the recent welter of mostly irrelevant postings inspired by a simple attempt to support the RCUK OA Self-Archiving Policy Proposal against ALPSP's attempt to delay or derail it (as the NIH and UK Select Committee Proposals were delayed and in the end derailed). The malady for which OA is the cure is nothing more nor less than this: Toll Access (TA) is available to those researchers who are at those institutions worldwide that can afford whatever fraction they can afford of the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, which publish about 2.5 million articles each year. No one knows exactly how many researchers there are on the planet, nor how many articles each can and cannot access among those articles that they would need to access in their respective fields. But we can safely say that *many* of them cannot access *much* of what they need. We can even roughly estimate *how* much they are missing, by comparing the use made of (i) what is accessible only via TA with (ii) what has also been supplemented (sic) by an OA version, self-archived by the author: We already know that published articles (in the same journal and year) that *do* have self-archived OA supplements are cited 50-250% more than those that do not. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html So let us (conservatively) say that the malady for which OA is meant to be the cure is a 50-250% access-gap. If all would-be users had access to all articles, there would be no access-gap, and no malady. Now, to continue with the reality: there are two potential cures for the malady (the 50-250% access-gap, remember), one being "gold" and one being "green." The gold cure is for publishers to become "good" publishers, making their contents OA (i.e., freely available to all users webwide) of their own accord, and covering their expenses some other way than by denying (online) access to those would-be users who cannot afford to pay. The golden cure is providing OA today for somewhere between 5-10% of the articles published annually, because that is about the percentage of journals that have elected to become OA so far. The number is growing, but it is growing slowly, because publishers are not eager -- for various reasons I could discuss, but won't, here -- to convert to the OA (gold) publishing model. http://www.doaj.org/ BioMed Central (BMC) is one of the "good" publishers who have adopted the OA model and publish about 150 of the approximately 2000 of the 24,000 journals published today that are gold; the other 22,000 are TA. BMC have published about 20,000 articles since they started publishing in the year 2000 or so. (Total articles published every year number about 2.5 million, recall.) http://archives.eprints.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.biomedcentral.com%2F No one yet has an accurate and realistic estimate of the annual growth rate in the number of OA journals, relative to the total number of journals, but projecting totals from the Directory of Open Access Journals for the past 24 months, it is clear that 100% or even 25% is far from sight and reach. So the golden road is a worthy one, but not one that is unlikely to bring us 100% OA for many, many years to come, if ever. Nor is there any direct way to accelerate it, because it is not possible to *require* journals to convert to OA. (Nor would it be just or legal to do so, no matter how beneficial it would be to the research community.) Then there is the green cure, which researchers can and do provide for themselves: The rough estimate of the percentage of annual articles being self-archived today is 15-25% (with the JISC survey suggesting that 49% of authors have self-archived at least *one* article). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ So there is more annual green OA than gold OA. Green OA is also almost certainly growing faster than gold OA. But it is still not growing nearly fast enough. The difference, though, is that green OA, unlike gold OA, *can* be accelerated, because researchers can be required (by their employers and their funders) to self-archive their articles. (And the above JISC survey also found that 81% of authors say they would comply with such a requirement willingly, and 14% more would comply reluctantly). It is just such a requirement that RCUK is proposing -- and that ALPSP (and other publishers) are opposing. (And that was the topic that precipitated this latest flurry of postings on every topic under the sun, but very little on the matter at hand.) And now we have yet another publisher, an OA publisher, good and gold, BMC: Is BMC supporting or opposing the RCUK self-archiving policy? On the face of it, BMC is supporting self-archiving, for it offers its Open Repository service to help institutions set up repositories to self-archive in. http://www.openrepository.com/ But unfortunately the planet is now littered with near-empty open repositories because the problem is not setting up repositories but *filling* them. Researchers do not self-archive spontaneously in sufficient numbers. This is the sub-problem for which the RCUK policy is the intended cure. http://archives.eprints.org So, having established that BMC is not doing much for green simply by offering a repository service, what is BMC doing to help fill those repositories? In particular, is it supporting or berating the RCUK proposal? The RCUK policy, to remind you, is to require authors to self-archive their final drafts -- not the publisher's version: the author's version. If the RCUK policy is adopted, we can safely project (based on the JISC compliance estimates above as well as the actual compliance figures for the only two institutions that have already adopted such a self-archiving requirement, Southampton ECS and CERN) an increase of OA in the UK from its current 15-25% level to over 90% within a few years (and with the rest of the world almost certainly following suit soon thereafter). http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University%20of%20Southampton%20Department%20of%20Electronics%20and%20Computer%20Science http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=CERN%3A%20European%20Organization%20for%20Nuclear%20Research Is Matt writing from BMC to support and celebrate this potential victory for OA, this potential closing of the 50-250% access gap, this potential cure for the malady? Or is Matt just writing to promote a product, one that is "better" than green OA, in fact the only product deserving of the brand-name "OA"? And if he has a better product/cure, is he proposing to deprive the patient of the green cure, in favour of waiting patiently for the eventual arrival of that gold cure? Let the reader judge. But please keep the following inescapable contingency in mind: If I am trying to persuade authors to submit their articles to my OA journal rather than to the TA competition, and I do this by persuading them of the advantages of OA, what am I to reply if they ask: "But why can't I just keep publishing in my old journals, and just self-archive my articles to make them OA"? Reply? "That's not really OA" or "That is non-optimal OA"... Comments follow: On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Matthew Cockerill wrote: > Quoting, I believe, Stevan's previous posting to the list: > > "Self-archiving the publisher's PDF is not necessary (except > where encouraged by the publisher) because the self-archived > version is a *supplement* to the official toll-access version, > not a *substitute* for it. It is intended for all those potential > users worldwide whose institutions cannot afford access to the > toll-access version. The publisher's PDF (or XML) version remains > the official version of record and should always be linked from > your self-archived supplement." > > I do find this position perplexing. Stevan is fond of saying that > self-archiving of the authors final version is a complete solution, > addressing all concerns that there could possibly be about access to the > literature. Nothing more is necessary, in his view. But he then follows > that by, effectively, saying that access to the self-archived copy is a > less-than-adequate replacement for the toll-access version, and gives > second-class access to those second-class citizens of the scientific > community who can't afford access to the official version of record. Who is giving second-class status to what? All I said was: Self-archive the supplement and link to the publisher's version. > You can't have your cake and eat it: The issue is the welfare of the baby, remember? All those would-be users, currently lacking access to 75-85% of annual research output. The 50-250% access gap. > Either > (a) the OA author's copy is a fully adequate, equally good substitute > for the official version. > In which case, as long as effective discovery is in place, there is > no reason to subscribe to a toll access journal. > or > (b) the OA author's copy is better than nothing, but not as good as > having access to the official version. Matt, I am not in the journal business, either OA or TA. All I said was self-archive and link to the publisher's version. I didn't tell anyone to subscribe to or cancel anything. I'll leave you to reflect on how much better the world's research community would be with the 50-250% access gap closed by access to the author's version. > If (a) is true, then ultimately subscriptions will surely decline, > and if open access is to continue, publishers will need to evolve towards > a mode of cost recovery other than toll access. Matt is now joining ALPSP in speculating, which is fine with me, but my concern is the baby (remember), which is currently suffering from a 50-250% access gap, which self-archiving can and will cure. And RCUK is proposing to cure it. And ALPSP is opposing it, saying it will make subscriptions decline. And there is no evidence to date for subscription decline. And Matt...? > If (b) is true, then OA self-archiving of the author's final version, > while a hugely important step forward, is not an optimal, unimprovable > solution. If full open access to the official version is possible, > then that is clearly preferable and would better serve the needs of the > research community. Matt, everything on earth can be improved upon. I am focusing on closing the 50-250% basic access-gap (for the baby, remember?) and you are looking at maybe a 1% improvement on top of that, and repeating BMC's 2-year old attempt to reserve the "OA" "brand" ("full open access") only for its product: "Free Access vs. Open Access" (August 2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html It's fine. Let's agree. 100% Self-Archiving is "a hugely important step forward." Let's take it. Let's express unequivocal support for it (especially when the RCUK resolve is still wavering in the balance under the ALPSP attempt to delay or derail it). This is not the time to fuss (with Marie Antoinette) about the icing on the cake, when there is still a 50-250% gap in access to the basic bread! > BioMed Central, along with a rapidly growing number of other open > access publishers, is clearly demonstrating that full access to the > official version *is* possible, and is no less economically viable than > a toll-access model. > > Matt Cockerill > Director of Operations, BioMed Central Ltd. That's splendid, hugely important. But it is too slow! (Rapidly growing? You show me a way to make UK OA (sic) grow faster than the RCUK mandate will make it grow and you've got another customer!) There is no way to require OA publishing to accelerate. It may never get there. And meanwhile, researchers continue to lose their daily, weekly, monthly access, usage and impact, needlessly, and 100% correctably. This is not the time to divert attention to the respects in which 100% self-archiving of author's drafts would still be "suboptimal"! Tell me about that when we are safely, unstoppably speeding on our way there; not now, when there is still a hugely important access-gap (50-250%), for most researchers, to much of research! Solomon would say: if you really care about the welfare of the baby, forget about the cake-icing and support the bid for the basic bread. Amen. Your Faithful Archivangelist, 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 Wed Aug 24 15:43:26 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:45 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 08:50:33 -0400 From: Michael Kurtz To: Stevan Harnad Hi Stevan, I thought I sent it to the group, but perhaps not. In any event your note said much of what I said. I do not understand how my saying complementary not competitive can be construed as supporting the disruptive technology thesis. Jean-Claude Gu?don wrote: >At the same time, one may puzzle as to why, when so many articles are >already available in open access, the rate of use is so low. I should make clear that my comparison was of use during July 2005 of articles published during 2004 in the Astrophysical Journal. These articles were published in 2003 and 2004 in astro_ph. The main use of astro_ph, like almost every publication, is for newly published articles. astro_ph is very heavily used in this manner, indeed it is likely that the readership of any particular article is greater in the ~6 months it is only available as a preprint in the arXiv than it is in the first couple of years it is available from the journal. Because the main use of astro_ph is before the article is available from the Astrophysical Journal, and after it is published the use is mainly from the ApJ (for the same article) the two services are more complementary than in competition. -- Dr. Michael J. Kurtz Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 60 Garden Street Cambridge, MA 02138 USA VOICE: +1-617-495-7434 FAX: +1-617-495-7467 E-MAIL: kurtz@cfa.harvard.edu WWW: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Aug 25 11:25:44 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:45 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving Message-ID: Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration A (shorter) UK-only version was co-signed by: Tim Berners-Lee (UK, Southampton & US, MIT) Dave De Roure (UK, Southampton) Stevan Harnad (UK, Southampton & Canada, UQaM) Derek Law (UK, Strathclyde) Peter Murray-Rust (UK, Cambridge) Charles Oppenheim (UK, Loughborough) Nigel Shadbolt (UK, Southampton) Yorick Wilks (UK, Sheffield) http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html This longer version is also signed by: Subbiah Arunachalam (India, MSRF) Helene Bosc (France, INRA, ret.) Fred Friend (UK, University College, London) Andrew Odlyzko (US, University of Minnesota) Peter Suber (US, Earlham) Please also see the version with hyperlinks: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html SUMMARY: The UK Research Funding Councils (RCUK) have proposed that all RCUK fundees should self-archive on the web, free for all, their own final drafts of journal articles reporting their RCUK-funded research, in order to maximise their usage and impact. ALPSP (a learned publishers' association) now seeks to delay and block the RCUK proposal, auguring that it will ruin journals. All objective evidence from the past decade and a half of self-archiving, however, shows that self-archiving can and does co-exist peacefully with journals while greatly enhancing both author/article and journal impact, to the benefit of both. Journal publishers should not be trying to delay and block self-archiving policy; they should be collaborating with the research community on ways to share its vast benefits. This is a public reply, co-signed by the above, to the August 5, 2005, public letter by Sally Morris, Executive Director of ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) to Professor Ian Diamond, Chair, RCUK (Research Councils UK), concerning the RCUK proposal to mandate the web self-archiving of authors' final drafts of all journal articles resulting from RCUK-funded research, making them freely accessible to all researchers worldwide who cannot afford access to the official journal version, in order to maximise the usage and impact of the RCUK-funded research findings. It is extremely important that the arguments and objective evidence for or against the optimality of research self-archiving policy be aired and discussed openly, as they have been for several years now, all over the world, so that policy decisions are not influenced by one-sided arguments from special interests that can readily be shown to be invalid. Every single one of the points made by the ALPSP below is incorrect -- incorrect from the standpoint of both objective evidence and careful logical analysis. We accordingly provide a point by point rebuttal here, along with a plea for an end to publishers' efforts to block or delay self-archiving policy -- a policy that is undeniably beneficial to research and researchers, as well as to their institutions and the public that funds them. Publishers should collaborate with the research community to share the benefits of maximising research access and impact. (Please note that this is not the first time the ALPSP's points have been made, and rebutted; but whereas the rebuttals take very careful, detailed account of the points made by ALPSP, the ALPSP unfortunately just keeps repeating its points without taking any account of the detailed replies. By way of illustration, the prior ALPSP critique of the RCUK proposal (April 19) was followed on July 1 by a point-by-point rebuttal. The reader who compares the two cannot fail to notice certain recurrent themes that ALPSP keeps ignoring in their present critique. In particular, 3 of the 5 examples that ALPSP cites below as evidence of the negative effects of self-archiving on journals turn out to have nothing at all to do with self-archiving, exactly as pointed out in the earlier rebuttal. The other 2 examples turn out to be positive evidence for the potential of sharing the benefits through cooperation and collaboration between the research and publishing community, rather than grounds for denying research and researchers those benefits through opposition.) The RCUK draft proposal is at: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/statement.pdf All quotes below are from: ALPSP response to RCUK's proposed position statement on access to research outputs http://www.alpsp.org/news/rcuk/default.htm which was addressed to: Professor Ian Diamond, Research Councils UK Secretariat on 5th August, 2005: > ALPSP: "Although the mission of our publisher members is to > disseminate and maximise access to research information" The principle of maximising access to research information is indeed the very essence of the issue at hand. The reader of the following statements and counter-statements should accordingly bear this principle in mind while weighing them: Unlike the authors of books or of magazine and newspaper articles, the authors of research journal articles are not writing in order to sell their words, but in order to share their findings, so other researchers can use and build upon them, in order to advance research progress, to the benefit of the public that funded the research. This usage and application is called research impact. Research impact is a measure of research progress and productivity: the influence that the findings have had on the further course of research and its applications; the difference it has made that a given piece of research has been conducted at all, rather than being left unfunded and undone. Research impact is the reason the public funds the research and the reason researchers conduct the research and report the results. Research that makes no impact may as well not have been conducted at all. One of the primary indicators -- but by no means the only one -- of research impact is the number of resulting pieces of research by others that make use of a finding, by citing it. Citation counts are accordingly quantitative measures of research impact. (The reader is reminded, at this early point in our critique, that it is impossible for a piece of research to be read, used, applied and cited by any researcher who cannot access it. Research access is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for research impact.) Owing to this central importance of impact in the research growth and progress cycle, the authors of research are rewarded not by income from the sales of their texts, like normal authors, but by 'impact income' based on how much their research findings are used, applied, cited and built upon. Impact is what helps pay the author's salary, what brings further RCUK grant income, and what brings RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) income to the author's institution. And the reason the public pays taxes for the RCUK and RAE to use to fund research in the first place is so that that research can benefit the public -- not so that it can generate sales income for publishers. There is nothing wrong with research also generating sales income for publishers. But there is definitely something wrong if publishers try to prevent researchers from maximising the impact of their research, by maximising access to it. For whatever limits research access limits research progress; to repeat: access is a necessary condition for impact. Hence, for researchers and their institutions, the need to 'maximise access to research information' is not just a pious promotional slogan: Whatever denies access to their research output is denying the public the research impact and progress it paid for and denying researchers and their institutions the impact income they worked for. Journals provide access to all individuals and institutions that can afford to subscribe to them, and that is fine. But what about all the other would-be users -- those researchers world-wide whose institutions happen to be unable to afford to subscribe to the journal in which a research finding happens to be published? There are 24,000 research journals and most institutions can afford access only to a small fraction of them. Across all fields tested so far (including physics, mathematics, biology, economics, business/management, sociology, education, psychology, and philosophy), articles that have been self-archived freely on the web, thereby maximising access, have been shown to have 50%-250+% greater citation impact than articles that have not been self-archived. Is it reasonable to expect researchers and their institutions and funders to continue to renounce that vast impact potential in an online age that has made this impact-loss no longer necessary? Can asking researchers to keep on losing that impact be seriously described as 'maximising access to research information'? Now let us see on what grounds researchers are being asked to renounce this impact: > ALPSP: "we find ourselves unable to support RCUK's proposed > position paper on the means of achieving this. We continue to > stress all the points we made in our previous response, dated 19 > April, and are insufficiently reassured by RCUK's reply. We are > convinced that RCUK's proposed policy will inevitably lead to the > destruction of journals." If it were indeed true that the RCUK's policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals, then this contingency would definitely be worthy of further time and thought. But there is in fact no objective evidence whatseover in support of this dire prophecy. All evidence (footnote 1) from 15 years of self-archiving (in some fields having reached 100% self-archiving long ago) is exactly the opposite: that self-archiving and journal publication can and do continue to co-exist peacefully, with institutions continuing to subscribe to the journals they can afford, and researchers at the institutions that can afford them continuing to use them; the only change is that the author's own self-archived final drafts (as well as earlier pre-refereeing preprints) are now accessible to all those researchers whose institutions could not afford the official journal version (as well as to any who may wish to consult the pre-refereeing preprints). In other words, the self-archived author's drafts, pre- and post-refereeing, are supplements to the official journal version, not substitutes for it. In the absence of any objective evidence at all to the effect that self-archiving reduces subscriptions, let alone destroys journals, and in the face of 15 years' worth of evidence to the contrary, ALPSP simply amplifies the rhetoric, elevating pure speculation to a putative justification for continuing to delay and oppose a policy that is already long overdue and a practice that has already been amply demonstrated to deliver something of immense benefit to research, researchers, their institutions and funders: dramatically enhanced impact. All this, ALPSP recommends, is to be put on hold because some publishers have the 'conviction' that self-archiving will destroy journals. > ALPSP: "A policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles > in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready > retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as > Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards > such as OAI-PMH), will accelerate the move to a disastrous > scenario." The objective evidence from 15 years of continuous self-archiving by physicists (even longer by computer scientists) has in fact tested this grim hypothesis; and this cumulative evidence affords not the slightest hint of any move to a 'disastrous scenario.' Throughout the past decade and a half, final drafts of hundreds of thousands of articles have been made freely accessible and readily retrievable by their authors (in some fields approaching 100% of the research published). And these have indeed been extensively accessed and retrieved and used and applied and cited by researchers in those disciplines, exactly as their authors intended (and far more extensively than articles for which the authors' drafts had not been made freely accessible). Yet when asked, both of the large physics learned societies (the Institute of Physics Publishing in the UK and the American Physical Society) responded very explicitly that they could identify no loss of subscriptions to their journals as a result of this critical mass of self-archived and readily retrievable physics articles (footnote 1). The ALPSP's doomsday conviction does not gain in plausibility by merely being repeated, ever louder. Google Scholar and OAI-PMH do indeed make the self-archived supplements more accessible to their would-be users, but that is the point: The purpose of self-archiving is to maximise access to research information. (Some publishers may still be in the habit of reckoning that research is well-served by access-denial, but the providers of that research -- the researchers themselves, and their funders -- can perhaps be forgiven for reckoning, and acting, otherwise.) > ALPSP: "Librarians will increasingly find that 'good enough' > versions of a significant proportion of articles in journals are > freely available; in a situation where they lack the funds to > purchase all the content their users want [emphasis added] it is > inconceivable that they would not seek to save money by cancelling > subscriptions to those journals. As a result, those journals will > die." First, please note the implicit premise here: Where research institutions 'lack the funds to purchase all the content their researchers want,' the users (researchers) should do without that content, and the providers (researchers) should do without the usage and impact, rather than just giving it to one another, as the RCUK proposes. And why? Because researchers giving their own research to researchers who cannot afford the journal version will make the journals die. Second, RCUK-funded researchers publish in thousands of journals all over the world -- the UK, Europe and North America. Their publications, though important, represent the output of only a small fraction of the world's research population. Neither research topics nor research journals have national boundaries. Hence it is unlikely that a 'significant proportion' of the articles in any particular journal will become freely available purely as a consequence of the RCUK policy. Third, journals die and are born every year, since the advent of journals. Their birth may be because of a new niche, and their demise might be because of the loss or saturation of an old niche, or because the new niche was an illusion. Scholarly fashions, emphases and growth regions also change. This is ordinary intellectual evolution plus market economics. Fourth (and most important), as we have already noted, physics journals already do contain a 'significant proportion' of articles that have been self-archived in the physics repository, arXiv -- yet librarians have not cancelled subscriptions (footnote 1) despite a decade and a half's opportunity to do so, and the journals continue to survive and thrive. So whereas ALPSP may find it subjectively 'inconceivable,' the objective fact is that self-carving is not generating cancellations, even where it is most advanced and has been going on the longest. Research libraries -- none of which can afford to subscribe to all journals, because they have only finite journals budgets -- have always tried to maximise their purchasing power, cancelling journals they think their users need less, and subscribing to journals they think their users need more. As objective indicators, some may use (1) usage statistics (paper and online) and (2) citation impact factors, but the final decision is almost always made on the basis of (3) surveys of their own users' recommendations (footnote 2). Self-archiving does not change this one bit, because self-archiving is not done on a per-journal basis but on a per-article basis. And it is done anarchically, distributed across authors, institutions and disciplines. An RCUK mandate for all RCUK-funded researchers to self-archive all their articles will have no net differential effect on any particular journal one way or the other. Nor will RCUK-mandated self-archiving exhaust the contents of any particular journal. So librarians' money-saving and budget-balancing subscription/cancellation efforts may proceed apace. Journals will continue to be born and to die, as they always did, but with no differential influence from self-archiving. But let us fast-forward this speculation: The RCUK self-archiving mandate itself is unlikely to result in any individual journal's author-archived supplements rising to anywhere near 100%, but if the RCUK model is followed (as is quite likely) by other nations around the world, we may indeed eventually reach 100% self-archiving for all articles in all journals. That would certainly be optimal for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders. Would it be disastrous for journals? A certain amount of pressure would certainly be taken off librarians' endless struggle to balance their finite journal budgets: The yearly journal selection process would no longer be a struggle for basic survival (as all researchers would have online access to at least the author-self-archived supplements), but market competition would continue among publisher-added-values, which include (1) the paper edition and (2) the official, value-added, online edition (functionally enriched with XML mark-up, citation links, publisher's PDF, etc.). The market for those added values would continue to determine what was subscribed to and what was cancelled, pretty much as it does now, but in a stabler way, without the mounting panic and desperation that struggling with balancing researchers' basic inelastic survival needs has been carrying with it for years now (the 'serials crisis'). If, on the other hand, the day were ever to come when there was no longer a market for the paper edition, and no longer a market for some of the online added-values, then surely the market can be trusted to readjust to that new supply/demand optimum, with publishers continuing to sell whatever added values there is still a demand for. One sure added-value, for example, is peer review. Although journals don't actually perform the peer review (researchers do it for them, for free), they do administer it, with qualified expert editors selecting the referees, adjudicating the referee reports, and ensuring that authors revise as required. It is conceivable that one day that peer review service will be sold as a separate service to authors and their insitutions, with the journal-name just a tag that certifies the outcome, instead of being bundled into a product that is sold to users and their institutions. But that is just a matter of speculation right now, when there is still a healthy demand for both the paper and online editions. Publishing will co-evolve naturally with the evolution of the online medium itself. But what cannot be allowed to happen now is for researchers' impact (and the public's investment and stake in it) to be held hostage to the status quo, under the pretext of forestalling a doomsday scenario that has no evidence to support it and all evidence to date contradicting it. > ALPSP: "The consequences of the destruction of journals' viability > are very serious. Not only will it become impossible to support > the whole process of quality control, including (but not limited > to) peer review" Notice that the doomsday scenario has simply been taken for granted here, despite the absence of any actual evidence for it, and despite all the existing evidence to the contrary. Because it is being intoned so shrilly and with such 'conviction', it is to be taken at face value, and we are simply to begin our reckoning with accepting it as an unchallenged premise: but that premise is without any objective foundation whatsoever. As ALPSP mentions peer review, however, is this not the point to remind ourselves that among the many (unquestionable) values that the publisher does add, peer-review is a rather anomalous one, being an unpaid service that researchers themselves are rendering to the publisher gratis (just as they give their articles gratis, without seeking any payment)? As noted above, peer review and the certification of its outcome could in principle be sold as a separate service to the author-institution, instead of being bundled with a product to the subscriber-institution; hence it is not true that it would be 'impossible to support' peer review even if journals' subscription base were to collapse entirely. But as there is no evidence of any tendency toward a collapse of the subscription base, this is all just hypothetical speculation at this point. > ALPSP: "but in addition, the research community will lose all the > other value and prestige which is added, for both author and > reader, through inclusion in a highly rated journal with a clearly > understood audience and rich online functionality." Wherever authors and readers value either the paper edition or the rich online functionality -- both provided only by the publisher -- they will continue to subscribe to the journal as long as they can afford it, either personally or through their institutional library. As noted above, this clearly continues to be the case for the physics journals that are the most advanced in testing the waters of self-archiving. Publishers who add sufficient value create a product that the market will pay for (by the definition of supply, demand and sufficient-value). However, surely the interests of research and the public that funds it are not best-served if those researchers (potential users) who happen to be unable to afford the particular journal in which the functionally enriched, value-added version is published are denied access to the basic research finding itself. Even more important and pertinent to the RCUK proposal: The fundee's and funder's research should not be denied the impact potential from all those researchers who cannot afford access. Researchers have always given away all their findings (to their publishers as well as to all requesters of reprints) so that other researchers could further advance the research by using, applying and building upon their findings. Access-denial has always limited the progress, productivity and impact of science and scholarship. Now the online age has at last made it possible to put an end to this needless access-denial and resultant impact-loss; the RCUK is simply the first to propose systematically applying the natural, optimal, and inevitable remedy to all research output. Whatever publisher-added value is truly value continues to be of value when it co-exists with author self-archiving. Articles continue to appear in journals, and the enriched functionality of the official value-added online edition (as well as the paper edition) are still there to be purchased. It is just that those who could not afford them previously will no longer be deprived of access to the research findings themselves > ALPSP: "This in turn will deprive learned societies of an important > income stream, without which many will be unable to support their > other activities -- such as meetings, bursaries, research funding, > public education and patient information -- which are of huge > benefit both to their research communities and to the general > public." (Notice, first, that this is all still predicated on the truth of the doomsday conviction -- 'that self-archiving will inevitably destroy journals' -- which is contradicted by all existing evidence.) But insofar as learned-societies 'other activieties' are concerned, there is a very simple, straight-forward way to put the proposition at issue: Does anyone imagine that -- if a trade-off, either/or choice point were ever actually reached -- researchers would knowingly and willingly choose to continue subsidising learned societies' admirable good works -- meetings, bursaries, research funding, public education and patient information -- at the cost of their own lost research impact? The ALPSP doomsday 'conviction', however, has no basis in evidence, hence there no either/or choice needs to be made. All indications to date are that learned societies will continue to publish journals -- adding value and successfully selling that added-value -- in peaceful co-existence with RCUK-mandated self-archiving. But entirely apart from that, ALPSP certainly has no grounds for asking researchers to renounce maximising their own research impact for the sake of financing learned societies' good works (like meetings, bursaries and public education) -- good works that could finance themselves in alternative ways that were not parasitic on research progress, if circumstances were ever to demand it The ALPSP letter began by stating that the mission of ALPSP publisher members is to 'disseminate and maximise access to research information'. Some of the journal-publishing learned societies do indeed affirm that this is their mission; yet by their restrictive publishing practices they actively contradict it, and defend the resulting inescapable contradiction by pleading a disaster scenario (very like the one ALPSP repeatedly invokes) in the name of protecting the publishing profits that support all of the society's other activities. Yet this is not the attitude of forward-thinking, member-oriented societies that understand properly what researchers in their fields need and know how to deliver it. Here is a quote from Dr Elizabeth Marincola, Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology, a sizeable but not huge society (10,000 members; many US scientific and medical societies have over 100,000 members): "I think the more dependent societies are on their publications, the farther away they are from the real needs of their members. If they were really doing good work and their members were aware of this, then they wouldn't be so fearful'' When my colleagues come to me and say they couldn't possibly think of putting their publishing revenues at risk, I think 'why haven't you been diversifying your revenue sources all along and why haven't you been diversifying your products all along?' The ASCB offers a diverse range of products so that if publications were at risk financially, we wouldn't lose our membership base because there are lots of other reasons why people are members." (Footnote 3) This perfectly encapsulates why we should not be too credulous about the dire warnings emanating from learned societies to the effect that self-archiving will damage research and its dissemination. The dissemination of research findings should, as avowed, be a high-priority service for societies -- a direct end in itself, not just a trade activity to generate profit so as to subsidise other activities, at the expense of research itself. > ALPSP: "The damaging effects will not be limited to UK-published > journals and UK societies; UK research authors publish their work > in the most appropriate journals, irrespective of the journals' > country of origin." The thrust of the above statement is rather unclear: The RCUK-mandated self-archiving itself will indeed be distributed across all journals, worldwide. Hence, if it had indeed been 'damaging', that damage would likewise be distributed (and diluted) across all journals, not concentrated on any particular journal. So what is the point being made here? But in fact there is no evidence at all that self-archiving is damaging to journals, rather than co-existing peacefully with them; and a great deal of evidence that it is extremely beneficial to research, researchers, their institutions and their funders. > ALPSP: "We absolutely reject unsupported assertions that > self-archiving in publicly accessible repositories does not and > will not damage journals. Indeed, we are accumulating a growing > body of evidence that the opposite is the case [emphasis added], > even at this early stage" We shall now examine whose assertions need to be absolutely rejected as unsupported, and whether there is indeed 'a growing body of evidence that the opposite is the case'. What follows is the ALPSP's 5 pieces of putative evidence in support of their expressed 'conviction' that self-archiving will damage journals. Please follow carefully, as the first two pieces of evidence [1]-[2] -- concerning usage and citation statistics -- will turn out to be positive evidence rather than negative evidence, and the last three pieces of evidence [3]-[5] -- concerning journals that make all of their own articles free online -- turn out to have nothing whatsoever to do with author self-archiving: > ALPSP: "For example: [1] Increasingly, librarians are making use > of COUNTER-compliant (and therefore comparable) usage statistics > to guide their decisions to renew or cancel journals. The Institute > of Physics Publishing is therefore concerned to see that article > downloads from its site are significantly lower for those journals > whose content is substantially replicated in the ArXiV repository > than for those which are not." How does example [1] show that 'the opposite is the case'? As has already been reported above, the Institute of Physics Publishing (UK) and the American Physical Society have both stated publicly that they can identify no loss of subscriptions as a result of nearly 15 years of self-archiving by physicists! (Moreover, publishers and institutional repositories can and will easily work out a collaborative system of pooled usage statistics, all credited to the publisher's official version; so that is no principled obstacle either.) The easiest thing in the world for Institutional Repositories (IRs) to provide to publishers (along with the link from the self-archived supplement in the IR to the official journal version on the publisher's website -- something that is already dictated by good scholarly practice) is the IR download statistics for the self-archived version of each article. These can be pooled with the download statistics for the official journal version and all of it (rightly) credited to the article itself. Another bonus that the self-archived supplements already provide is enhanced citation impact -- of which it is not only the article, the author, the institution and the funder who are the co-beneficiaries, but also the journal and the publisher, in the form of an enhanced journal impact factor (average citation count). It has also been demonstrated recently that download impact and citation impact are correlated, downloads in the first six months after publication being predictive of citations after 2 years. All these statistics and benefits are there to be shared between publishers, librarians and research institutions in a cooperative, collaborative atmosphere that welcomes the benefits of self-archiving to research and that works to establish a system that shares them among the interested parties. Collaboration on the sharing of the benefits of self-archiving is what learned societies should be setting up meetings to do -- rather than just trying to delay and oppose what is so obviously a substantial and certain benefit to research, researchers, their institutions and funders, as well as a considerable potential benefit to journals, publishers and libraries. If publishers take an adversarial stance on self-archiving, all they do is deny themselves of its potential benefits (out of the groundless but self-sustaining 'conviction' that self-archiving can inevitably bring them only disaster). Its benefits to research are demonstrated and incontestable, hence will incontestably prevail. (ALPSP's efforts to delay the optimal and inevitable will not redound to learned societies' historic credit; the sooner they drop their filibustering and turn to constructive cooperation and collaboration, the better for all parties concerned.) > ALPSP: "[2] Citation statistics and the resultant impact factors > are of enormous importance to authors and their institutions; > they also influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. > Both the Institute of Physics and the London Mathematical Society > are therefore troubled to note an increasing tendency for authors > to cite only the repository version of an article, without > mentioning the journal in which it was later published." Librarians' decisions about which journals to renew or cancel take into account a variety of comparative measures, citation statistics being one of them (footnote 2). Self-archiving has now been analysed extensively and shown to increase journal article citations substantially in field after field; so journals carrying self-archived articles will have higher impact factors, and will hence perform better under this measure in competing for their share of libraries' serials budgets. This refutes example [2]. As to the proper citation of the official journal version: This is merely a question of proper scholarly practice, which is evolving and will of course adapt naturally to the new medium; a momentary lag in scholarly rigour is certainly no argument against the practice of self-archiving or its benefits to research and researchers. Moreover, publishers and institutional repositories can and will easily work out a collaborative system of pooled citation and reference statistics -- all credited to the official published version. So that is no principled obstacle either. This is all just a matter of adapting scholarly practices naturally to the new medium (and is likewise inevitable). It borders on the absurd to cite something whose solution is so simple and obvious as serious grounds for preventing research impact from being maximised by universal self-archiving! > ALPSP: "[3] Evidence is also growing that free availability of > content has a very rapid negative effect on subscriptions. Oxford > University Press made the contents of Nucleic Acids Research > freely available online six months after publication; subscription > loss was much greater than in related journals where the content > was free after a year. The journal became fully Open Access this > year, but offered a substantial reduction in the publication > charge to those whose libraries maintained a print subscription; > however, the drop in subscriptions has been far more marked than > was anticipated." This is a non-sequitur, having nothing to do with self-archiving, one way or the other (as was already pointed out in the prior rebuttal of APLSP's April critique of the RCUK proposal): This example refers to an entire journal's contents -- the official value-added versions, all being made freely accessible, all at once, by the publisher -- not to the anarchic, article-by-article self-archiving of the author's final draft by the author, which is what the RCUK is mandating. This example in fact reinforces what was noted earlier: that RCUK-mandated self-archiving does not single out any individual journal (as OU Press did above with one of its own) and drive its self-archived content to 100%. Self-archiving is distributed randomly across all journals. Since journals compete (somewhat) with one another for their share of each institution's finite journal acquisitions budget, it is conceivable that if one journal gives away 100% of its official, value-added contents online and the others don't, that journal might be making itself more vulnerable to differential cancellation (though not necessarily: there are reported examples of the exact opposite effect too, with the free online version increasing not only visibility, usage and citations, but thereby also increasing subscriptions, serving as an advertisement for the journal). But this is in any case no evidence for cancellation-inducing effects of self-archiving, which involves only the author's final drafts and is not focussed on any one journal but randomly distributed across all journals, leaving them to continue to compete for subscriptions amongst themselves, on the basis of their relative merits, exactly as they did before. > ALPSP: "[4] The BMJ Publishing Group has noted a similar effect; > the journals that have been made freely available online on > publication have suffered greatly increased subscription attrition, > and access controls have had to be imposed to ensure the survival > of these titles." Exactly the same reply as above: The risks of making 100% of one journal's official, value-added contents free online while all other journals are not doing likewise has nothing whatosever to do with anarchic self-archiving, by authors, of the final drafts of their own articles, distributed randomly across journals. > ALPSP: "[5] In the USA, the Institute for Operations Research and > the Management Sciences found that two of its journals had, without > its knowledge, been made freely available on the Web. For one > of these, an established journal, they noted a subscriptions > decline which was more than twice as steep as the average for > their other established journals; for the other, a new journal > where subscriptions would normally have been growing, they declined > significantly. While the unauthorised free versions have now been > removed, it is too early to tell whether the damage is permanent." Exactly the same artifact as in the prior two cases. (The trouble with self-generated Doomsday Scenarios is that they tend to assume such a grip on the imagination that their propounders cannot distinguish objective evidence from the 'corroboration' that comes from merely begging the question or changing the subject!) In all three examples, whole journals were made freely available, all at once, in their entirety, along with all the added value and rich online functionality that a journal provides. This is not at all the same as authors self-archiving only their own final drafts (which are simply their basic research reports), and doing so on a single-article (rather than a whole-journal) basis. Yet the latter is all that the RCUK proposes to mandate. Hence examples [3]-[5] are really a misleading conflation of two altogether different matters, creating the illusion of support for what is in fact an untenable conclusion on which they actually have no bearing one way or the other. [Moreover -- even though it has nothing at all to do with what the RCUK is mandating --if one does elect to look at evidence from whole-journal open access then there are many more examples of journals that have benefited from being made freely available: Molecular Biology of the Cell's subscriptions, for example, have grown steadily after free access was provided by its publisher, The American Society for Cell Biology (footnote 3). That journal also enjoys a high impact factor and healthy submissions by authors, encouraged by the increased exposure their articles receive. The same has happened for journals published by other societies (footnote 4).] > ALPSP: "In addition, it is increasingly clear that this is exactly > how researchers are already using search engines such as Scirus > and Google Scholar: Greg R. Notess, Reference Librarian, Montana > State University, in a recent article in Information Today (Vol > 29, No 4) writes 'At this point, my main use of both [Scirus and > Google Scholar] is for finding free Web versions of otherwise > inaccessible published articles.'" This is merely a repetition of ALPSP's earlier point about OAI and Google Scholar. Reply: Yes, these wonderful new resources do increase access to the self-archived supplements: but that's the point! To maximise research access, usage and impact. Other search engines that retrieve free access articles (such as citebase, citeseer and OAIster) likewise serve the research community by enabling any unsubscribed researchers to find and access drafts of articles they could not otherwise use because they are accessible only by subscription. ISI's Web of Knowledge and Elsevier's Scopus, both paid services, find the authors' free versions as well as the journals' subscription-only versions, which researchers can then use whenever they or their institutions can afford subscription, license, or pay-per-view access; Elsevier's Scirus, a free service, likewise retrieves both, as does Google itself (if at least the reference metadata are made web-accessible). All these services do indeed help to maximise access, usage and impact, all to the benefit of the impact of that small proportion of current research that happens to be spontaneously self-archived already (15%). The RCUK mandate will increase this benefit systematically to that remaining 85% of UK research output that is still only accessible today to those who can afford the official journal version. > ALPSP: "'I found a number of full-text articles via Google Scholar > that are PDFs downloaded from a publisher site and then posted > on another site, free to all.'" This point, on the other hand, is not about author self-archiving, but about pirating and bootleg of the publisher's official version. RCUK is not mandating or condoning anything like that: The policy pertains only to authors' own final drafts, self-archived by them -- not to the published version poached by 3rd party consumers, which is called theft. (Hence this point is irrelevant.) > ALPSP: "'Both Scirus and Scholar were also useful for finding > author-hosted article copies, preprints, e-prints, and other > permutations of the same article.'" Exactly as one would hope they would be, if one hopes to 'maximise access to research'. > ALPSP: "In the light of this growing evidence of serious and > irreversible damage, each publisher must have the right to establish > the best way of expanding access to its journal content that is > compatible with continuing viability." So far no evidence whatsoever of 'serious and irreversible damage' (or indeed of any damage) caused by author self-archiving has been presented by ALPSP. (This is unsurprising, because in reality no such evidence exists, and all existing evidence is to the contrary.) Of course publishers can and should do whatever they wish in order to expand access to their journal content and remain viable. But they certainly have no right to prevent researchers, their institutions and their funders from likewise doing whatever they can and wish in order to expand the access to, and the impact of, their own research findings -- nor to expect them to agree to keep waiting passively to see whether their publishers will one day maximise their access and impact for them. 100% self-archiving is already known to be both doable and to enhance research impact substantially; self-archiving has also been co-existing peacefully with journals for over a decade and a half (including in those fields where 100% self-archiving has already been reached) ; 100% self-archiving overall is already well overdue, and years' worth of research impact have already been needlessly lost waiting for it. ALPSP has given no grounds whatsoever for continuing this delay for one moment longer. It has merely aired a doomsday scenario of its own imagination and then adduced 'evidence' in its support that is obviously irrelevant and defeasible.What is certain is that research impact cannot be held hostage to publishers' anxieties, simply on the grounds of their subjective intensity. > ALPSP: "This is not best achieved by mandating the earliest > possible self-archiving, and thus forcing the adoption of untried > and uncosted publishing practices." Self-archiving in October 2005 is not 'the earliest possible self-archiving' It is self-archiving that is already at least a decade overdue. And it has nothing to do with untried and uncosted publishing practices: Self-archiving is not a publishing practice at all; it is a researcher practice. And it has been tried and tested -- with great success and great benefits for research progress -- for over 15 years now. What is needed today is more self-archiving -- 100% -- not more delay. Or does the 'earliest possible' here refer not to when the RCUK self-archiving mandate is at last implemented, but how early the published article should be self-archived? If so, the answer from the point of view of research impact and progress is unambiguous: The final draft should be self-archived and made accessible to all potential users immediately upon acceptance for publication (prefinal preprint drafts even earlier, if the author wishes). No research usage or progress should be held back arbitrarily for 3, 6, 12 or more months, for any reason whatsoever. It cannot be stressed enough just how crucial it is for RCUK to resist any pressure to impose or allow any sort of access-denial period, of any length, during which unpaid access to research findings would be embargoed -- findings that the RCUK has paid for, with public money, so that they can be immediately reported, used, applied and built upon, for the benefit of the public that paid for it, not so that they can be embargoed, for the benefit of assuaging publishers' subjective fears about 'disaster scenarios' for which there does not exist a shred of objective evidence. Any delay that is allowed amounts to an embargo on research productivity and progress, at the expense of the interests of the tax-paying public. That is exactly what happened recently to the US National Institutes of Health's public access policy, setting US research access and impact back several years. Fortunately, there is a simple compromise that will completely immunise the RCUK mandate from any possibility of being rendered ineffectual in this way: What all RCUK-funded researchers should be required to self-archive in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) immediately upon acceptance for publication are: (1) each article's metadata (author name, date, article title, journal name, etc.). plus (2) each article's final draft (full-text) That fulfills the RCUK requirement. The access-setting, however, can then be given two options: (OA) Open Access (both the metadata and the full-text are made freely accessible to everyone webwide) or (IA) Institutional Access (the metadata are freely accessible webwide but the full-text is made accessible only to the fundee's institution, its employees, and its funders, such as the RCUK and RAE, for record-keeping, grant-fulfillment and performance-assessment purposes). The RCUK fundee is strongly encouraged (but not required) to set access to OA immediately. As 90% of journals have already given article self-archiving their official green light, 90% of articles can have their access set to OA immediately. For the remaining 10%, the author can set access to IA initially, but of course each article's metadata (author, title, journal, etc.) will immediately be openly accessible webwide to all would-be users, just as the metadata of the OA 90% are. That's enough data so that would-be users can immediately email the author for an 'eprint' (the author's final draft) if they cannot afford to access the journal version. The author can keep emailing eprints to each would-be user until either the remaining 10% of journals update their policy or the author tires of doing all those needless keystrokes and sets articleaccess to OA. In the meanwhile, however, 100% of RCUK-funded research will be immediately accessible webwide, 90% of it directly, and 10% of it with author mediation, maximising its access and impact. Nature can take care of the rest at its leisure. > ALPSP: "It is clearly unrealistic to consult adequately with all > those likely to be affected over the summer holiday period, and > we therefore urge you to extend the consultation period and to > defer, for at least 12 months, the introduction of any mandate > for authors to self-archive. In the meantime, we would like to > take up RCUK's expressed willingness to engage with both publishers > and learned societies, beginning with a meeting in early September > with representatives of ALPSP; we propose one of the following > dates: 5th September, 6th September, 7th September, 8th September > We look forward to a reply at your earliest convenience. Yours > sincerely Sally Morris, Chief Executive" The consultation has been going on since long before 'the summer holiday period' and there has already been far more delay and far more research impact needlessly lost than anyone can possibly justify. Some members of the publishing community are quite leisurely about continuing to prolong this needless loss of research impact and progress in order to continue debating, but the research community itself is not (as indicated, for example, by the ill-fated demand for open access -- by a deadline of September 1, 2001 -- on the part of the 34,000 researchers who signed the PloS petition). RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving mandate, with no further delay or deferral, and then meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in pooling download and citation statistics, and in other other ways of sharing the benefits of maximising UK research access and impact. Any further pertinent matters and developments can be discussed as well -- but not at the cost of further delaying what is indisputably the optimal and inevitable (and long overdue) outcome for research, researchers, their institutions, and their funders -- and for the public, which funds the research on the understanding that its use and applications are meant to be maximised to benefit the public's interests, not minimised to protect other parties' from imaginary threats to their interests. (A shorter UK version of this critique -- http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html -- has been co-signed by the following UK senior researchers [in boldface] and sent as hard copy to the recipients of the ALPSP statement. The present longer analysis has also been co-signed by some prominent international supporters of the RCUK initiative.) Tim Berners-Lee (UK, Southampton & US, MIT) Dave De Roure (UK, Southampton) Stevan Harnad (UK, Southampton & Canada, UQaM) Derek Law (UK, Strathclyde) Peter Murray-Rust (UK, Cambridge) Charles Oppenheim (UK, Loughborough) Nigel Shadbolt (UK, Southampton) Yorick Wilks (UK, Sheffield) Subbiah Arunachalam (India, MSRF) Helene Bosc (France, INRA, ret.) Fred Friend (UK, University College, London) Andrew Odlyzko (US, University of Minnesota) Peter Suber (US, Earlham) References 1. Swan, A (2004). Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding. American Scientist Open Access Forum: 3 February 2005. 2. Personal communication from a UK University Library Director: 'I know of no HE library where librarians make cancellation or subscription decisions. Typically they say to the department/faculty 'We have to save X,000" from your share of the serials budget: what do you want to cut?'. These are seen as academic --not metrics-driven -- judgements, and no librarian makes those academic judgements, as they are indefensible in Senate' [S]uch decisions are almost always wholly subjective, not objective, and have nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of repositories.' 3. The society lady: an interview with Elizabeth Marincola. Open Access Now: 6 October 2003 4. Walker, T (2002) Two societies show how to profit by providing free access. Learned Publishing 15: 279-284. Copies of ALPSP open letter were also sent to: The Lord Sainsbury of Turville Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Science and Innovation Department of Trade and Industry, Professor Sir Keith O'Nions Director General of Research Councils Office of Science and Technology Dr. Astrid Wissenburg RCUK Secretariat, Professor Colin Blakemore Medical Research Council, Frances Marsden Arts and Humanities Research Council, Professor Julia Goodfellow Biotechnology and Biological Research Council, Professor Richard Wade Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council, Professor Alan Thorpe Natural Environment Research Council, Professor John O'Reilly Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Professor John Wood Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, Andrea Powell Chair of ALPSP Council, (Director of Publishing, CAB International) From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Aug 31 04:48:47 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Press Coverage of the Imminent RCUK Self-Archiving Policy Decision Message-ID: The imminent RCUK decision on its self-archiving policy is receiving considerable press coverage in the UK: Scientists reignite open access debate Clive Cookson, Science Editor, Financial Times, Wednesday, August 31 http://news.ft.com/cms/s/3d2ef25a-19bb-11da-804e-00000e2511c8.html Publishers make last stand against open access Donald MacLeod, Education Guardian, Tuesday, August 30 http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1559097,00.html Publish university science for free, urges web creator [Tim Berners-Lee] Richard Wray The Guardian & The Observer, Tuesday, August 30 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1558870,00.html BBC Scotland (Radio) Newsdrive, Tuesday, August 31 (16:25) http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radioscotland_aod.shtml?scotland/newsdrive (click "Listen Again" for the Tuesday broadcast; item is at about 16:25) From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Aug 31 07:36:15 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Journal Publishing and Self-Archiving: Complementary Or Competitive? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, Jan Velterop wrote: > I am passionately pro open access, let there be no misunderstanding about > that, and have been for a long time. But... > I am sympathetic to the fact that [publishers] do not see the 'evidence' of > physics as convincing enough to rest assured that self-archiving won't harm them. Translation: I am passionately pro open access publishing -- not so passionately pro open access self-archiving. > (They may not necessarily be reassured if the surgeon about to perform > heart surgery on them shows an impeccable record replacing hips). Why is > the evidence that the BMJ has lost a substantial number of subscribers > since they went open access not treated as equally valid as the physics case? Please read the rebuttal to the ALPSP open letter seeking to delay or divert the RCUK self-archiving mandate. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html BMJ = British Medical Journal ASA = Author Self Archiving BMJ: Publisher's value-added version is given away free online ASA: Author's final draft is given away free online BMJ: Full-content of entire journal is given away by the publisher free online ASA: Single author-drafts are given away by the author free online BMJ: All of value-added online contents are immediately free online ASA: Author's drafts of some proportion of a journal's contents are free online (when and how many and which is unpredictable, anarchic) BMJ: All journal content effected ASA: RCUK can only mandate self-archiving of UK portion of any journal's content By Jan's own logic (but a slightly more pertinent version of the simile), if heart surgery success declines when one implants an artificial heart it does not follow that hip surgery success will decline when one implants an artificial hip). (The rebuttal also notes that the outcome for artificial heart implantation [whole-journal giveaway] is mixed, with some reports of decline and some reports of improvement.) > And I also believe that authors do not 'give away' their articles to > publishers. "Give away" means "without seeking royalties or fees," as all other authors do. > Why would they give it to publishers anyway? (1) They give it (royalty/fee-free) to publishers because they want it published (in paper days, on-paper, in online days, both on-paper and online). They want it published it so it will be used, applied, built upon, and cited. In other words, they publish it for the sake of *research impact.* (2) They give it to publishers because they want it to be peer-reviewed, improved, and certified with the established quality-standards of the publisher. (The peer-reviewers, like the authors, give away their peer-reviewing services to the publisher free for the sake of the same outcome the author seeks.) > [Authors] don't need publishers to 'give away' their articles to the > world. They 'trade-in' the copyright to their articles for the recognition, > kudos, and the like that comes with having them accepted and published by > peer-reviewed journals. To repeat, (research-article) authors give their papers to publishers (without seeking royalties or fees) so they can be peer-reviewed and published, for the sake of maximal uptake, usage and impact. In the paper era, that was all there was to it: Only those who could afford the paper product could have access, and the costs of producing and distributing the paper product had to be covered by levying an access fee. With the advent of the online era, it became possible for authors to provide free online access to the author's draft as a supplement, for those would-be users who could *not* afford the publisher's value-added version. The rest is just about the fact that there is no evidence that this author supplement has had any effect on the revenues from the publisher's version. As to "trading in" copyright (the "Faustian Bargain"): Jan may not have noticed that over 90% of journals are "green," i.e., they endorse author self-archiving -- because to oppose it is to oppose researchers maximising research impact, which would be a very awkward and unstable position for publishers to try to adopt in the PostGutenberg era, in this delicate and anomalous form of literature, where the authors seek no royalties or fees from their publishers, specifically because they are publishing for usage and impact, not for income. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php > Trading- in copyright carries with it the > limitation in terms of dissemination inherent in the model. It has for a > while been called a 'Faustian bargain', though that seems to have gone out > of fashion. It has only gone out of fashion because over 90% of journals (including all of Springer's are already green (and authors can self-archive even without their publisher's blessing): http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#copyright-transfer-forbids > In an open access publishing model they don't trade-in their > copyright, but just pay for the service of publishing, and so avoid the > limitations in dissemination, but instead have open access to their article. Translation: Jan Velterop is "passionately pro" open access ("gold") publishing, but not so passionate, not so pro open access (green) self-archiving. Possibly because he has a (gold) product/service to sell, whereas green OA does not; possibly because to say otherwise would be to admit that authors have 3, not 2 options, among their "Open Choices"... Stevan Harnad