Jan Velterop of Springer Open Choice continues to campaign for double-paid
OA: With publication costs all paid for by institutional subscriptions,
authors pay $3000 extra in order to provide Open-Choice Gold OA for their
article.
I continue to advocate that authors self-archive (and that their
institutions and funders mandate that they self-archive) their published
articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to provide
Green OA. There is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while
institutional subscriptions are paying all publication costs.
Sixty-two percent of journals (including all Springer journals) already
endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving. Yet the adoption of Green
OA self-archiving mandates has been delayed far too long already by
publishers either lobbying against self-archiving mandates, or adopting
self-archiving embargoes, or both.
In order to put an end to all further delay in the adoption of
self-archiving mandates, publishers need to be taken out of this research
community decision loop altogether. Mandating deposit in an Institutional
Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which publishers
should have no say whatsoever.
The way to put an end to the publisher filibuster on Green OA
self-archiving mandates is the pro-tem compromise of weakening the
mandates into immediate-deposit/optional-access mandates, so that they
can be adopted without any further delay. This immunizes them from any
further attempts by publishers to prevent or delay adoption: Only deposit
is mandated (immediately). Access to the immediate deposit can then either
be set as Open Access immediately, or (in case of a publisher embargo),
as Closed Access, provisionally.
This way we have universal immediate-deposit, now, and almost-immediate
almost-OA, now. 100% OA can and will follow soon after.
But Jan is not concerned about this. He has a product to sell:
On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Jan Velterop wrote:
> It almost looks as if there is a new OA sprout on the stem: "almost-OA".
No new sprout on the stem: Just a temporary compromise in order to usher
in universal self-archiving mandates without any further possibility of
delay by publishers.
What is strongly recommended is immediate OA self-archiving. But what is
mandated is immediate deposit.
Universal immediate-deposit mandates mean immediate OA for at least 62% of
articles, and, with the help of the "Fair Use" Button, almost-immediate,
almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (For the time being. Embargoes will
disappear very soon thereafter, under pressure from the powerful,
propagating benefits of universal OA.)
Jan would like to disparage this in order to promote paying for $3000
Open Choice Gold OA. He is free to promote his product, of course,
but he is in competition with good sense, which can be promoted too:
> JV:
> In a recent post , Stevan Harnad gives the following advice to authors,
> resulting in this "almost-OA":
>
> >SH:
> >"... always deposit the postprint (i.e., the refereed, revised, accepted
> >final draft) immediately upon acceptance for publication (*definitely* not
> >12 months later!) and set the access as "Closed Access" instead of "Open
> >Access," if you wish, which means the metadata (author, title, journal,
> >abstract) are openly accessible to anyone on the web immediately, but the
> >full-text is not. In addition, as I wrote before, make sure to implement
> >the "Fair Use" Button in ZORA: EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST.
> >
> >All searches will lead to the Closed Access Deposit, and that in turn has
> >the Button, which will provide for all usage needs during the
> >1-year embargo, semi-automatically, almost immediately, via almost-OA."
>
> JV:
> This "almost-OA", metadata plus a 'fair-use button', has of course been
> there for a long time already -- almost 15 years, I would say (and much
> longer if one considers the pre-web era). And it's been there without
> almost any self-archiving of almost any kind. Go to almost any publisher's
> web site, and you'll find the metadata for any article, plus a 'fair-use
> button' (usually, -- dare I say almost always? -- in the guise of an email
> address represented by an icon that looks like an envelope). Establishing
> repositories and a deposit mandate may be desired for many reasons, but if
> their main goal is to achieve "almost-OA" it rather seems a waste of time
> and money.
Jan misses two fundamental and obvious differences here: (1) Author
self-archiving places the article in the author's own Institutional
Repository, not a publisher's proprietary paid-access website and (2)
the Fair Use Button does not merely offer the author's email address:
The requester pastes in his own email address and clicks and the author
gets an automatic email with the request and a URL, which he need merely
click to have the eprint automatically emailed to the requester.
That, dear Jan, is the difference between night and day; the difference
between a system whose goal is 100% OA and a system whose goal is to get
paid for yet another thing (even when all bills are already paid and all
expenses are already covered).
No, the immediate-deposit mandate plus the Button is not yet 100%
OA. But it's close; and 100% immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button
will soon lead to 100% OA. The delayed deposits (or no deposits at all)
for which some publishers are lobbying never will. The double-paid Open
Choice Gold OA even less so.
OA advocates are for OA; just OA. Open-Choice Gold advocates seem more
intent on more-pay than OA...
> OA publishing, on the other hand, delivers not "almost-OA", but true and
> immediate OA (whether or not the articles are deposited in a repository,
> which is, by the way, automatically done by the full and hybrid OA
> publishers I am familiar with).
Green OA delivers "true and immediate" OA. It is publisher embargoes
that reduce it to almost-OA! But that's fine. The research community
will already be incomparably better off with Green OA for 62% of its
articles and almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (Springer journals are
among the 62% that endorse immediate Green OA, but, before you say it,
yes, even if Springer and others choose to renege, universal almost-OA
will be incomparably preferable to the status quo -- and it won't have
the deterrent of costing an extra $3000 per article, while subscriptions
are still paying all the publishing costs.)
And universal almost-OA, through universal immediate-deposit mandates,
will very soon bring on 100% OA.
> So my advice to authors who want secure,
> sustainable, future-proof, easy OA, is to publish with OA, in a journal
> that gives that opportunity, be it a new OA journal that only accepts OA
> articles, or an established and trusted 'hybrid' journal, that offers the
> OA choice.
And my advice to authors is to self-archive in their institutional
repositories no matter what else they do -- and to pay for Gold OA
only if and when they can afford it, and feel it's worth the extra price.
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_at_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/
Received on Wed Apr 18 2007 - 15:00:10 BST