It is good to hear again from Syun Tutiya, Chiba University. This open dialogue on optimal Open Access policy and strategy in advance of Open Access week is very helpful, not only for Japan, but worldwide, for I think that the situation and developments in Japan are very much like those in other parts of the world:

On 2010-09-18, at 8:44 AM, Syun Tutiya wrote:

> If I may, I would like to add, as part of the Japanese repository
> community, that it has consciously kept away from Gold Open Access
> Fever or whatever you make call it.

"Gold fever" is the (very mistaken) idea that "Open Access" is synonymous with "Open Access Publishing" ("Gold OA") and the (equally mistaken) idea that the fastest or surest way to provide OA is by publishing in a Gold OA journal or providing funds for publishing in Gold OA journals.

Both of these views are erroneous, because the other way of providing OA -- author self-archiving of the final refereed draft of each journal article, in the author's institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication: Not only is "Green OA" just as OA as Gold OA, but it is also the fastest and surest way of providing immediate OA today. It also does not entail any extra cost.

There is only one obstacle to immediate, universal Green OA, and it is neither cost nor publisher opposition: It is researcher passivity. And the remedy is very simple: Institutions and funders need to mandate (i.e., require) Green OA self-archiving (as 170 have already done: see ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Across the past decade, both the feasibility and the benefits of OA have been made widely known to researchers (although of course further dissemination of this information is still helpful today): There are Institutional repositories all over the planet, ready for authors to self-archive in (see ROAR). The majority of the journals (including virtually all the top journals worldwide) have already endorsed immediate Green OA self-archiving (and there is a solution even for those articles for which the author wishes to honour a publisher's access embargo). A significant OA citation impact advantage has now been repeatedly demonstrated in every discipline tested. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

The only thing needed is the adoption of a Green OA mandate. If adopted, the mandate works, climbing from 60% OA toward 100% within a few years of adoption.

In contrast -- and this too has been demonstrated repeatedly, in year after year, institution after institution and country after country -- neither providing information about OA, nor providing repositories to self-archive in, nor requesting, inviting, encouraging, or urging researchers to self-archive -- generates a self-archiving rate greater than the 5-25% baseline. This is true even if researchers are offered incentives and assistance for self-archiving.

The only policy that works is mandating Green OA self-archiving; and cross-disciplinary, international surveys (including in Japan!) have also found that over 90% of researchers report they will comply with self-archiving mandates, and, most important, over 80% of them will comply *willingly*: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/

So researcher passivity is exactly that: passivity, not opposition. When explained clearly, not only is OA not opposed by researchers, but neither are OA mandates.

The trouble is, that although -- apart from "Gold Fever" -- OA itself is becoming much more widely known and understood globally, Green OA mandates are not yet well enough understood, so the incorrect impression is being given -- even by some well-meaning advocates -- that OA mandates are somehow infringements on "academic freedom" or an imposition of something that is against researcher's will. The reality is nothing of the sort: OA requirements are more like a change in format requirements, involving a few extra keystrokes.

Instead waiting for self-archiving rates to rise above the 5-25% unmandated baseline as a result of encouragement, advocacy, incentives or assistance is simply to wait in vain for still more years to discover that researchers will only self-archive systematically and in sufficient numbers if it is mandated, just as "publish or perish" is. That is the only way to overcome the inertia of their (groundless but paralytic) worries that (e.g.) self-archiving might violate copyright, bypass peer review, bias journals against accepting their papers, or cost a lot of time and effort to do.

> It has been working on "voluntary
> though assisted" self-archiving through collaboration with the faculty
> and reseachers rather than implementing the mandated depositing . Yes,
> it has maybe just reached the baseline deposit rate but we believe
> that it is not tactically wise to rush and shout for the mandate in
> the atomsphere of the Japanese campus politics, which I don't to like
> to detail in a short message. We still believe that advocacy should
> work. Hokkaido is, in a sense, unique that mandating is openly
> discussed on campus for reasons I don't know.

I am willing to bet that there is absolutely nothing that is unique to Japan in any of this. The special reasons and evidence that you imagine would require a longer message to convey to me, to explain why "mandates are impossible" in Japan, or "mandates are premature in Japan" will turn out not to be special at all, but exactly the same a-priori reasons and evidence that keep being adduced everywhere on the planet -- all groundless and easily shown to be so, but nevertheless always cropping up everywhere, and sufficient to keep most of the institutions in a steady state of paralysis, imagining (as you, Syun, are evidently imagining in Japan) that just a few more years of advocacy and assistance will do the trick!

It will not. It will just lose a few more years of OA access and impact, needlessly -- and irretrievably.

And there is no process of "reaching" the spontaneous baseline deposit rate through time, with the help of advocacy and assistance! The spontaneous baseline self-archiving rate has been with us ever since you invited me to talk at the National Institute for Informatics and several universities in Japan in November 2004 (http://www.j-c-c.co.jp/lf6forum.htm -- dead link) and even earlier. Yes, cumulative deposits grow from year to year; but the annual deposit rate does not change significantly (global warming and glacial recession is growing faster!) -- except if deposit is mandated.

> A couple of factual comments: Generally speaking, Hokkaido University
> has virtually no problem about accessing but it not confirmed yet that
> it has lost impact because the researchers there have not deposited
> enough or because they have not published in OA journals.

These are two separate issues:

First, the fact that OA enhances usage and citations is not a local one, but a global one, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly, in field after field. I don't think it needs a special test for Hokkaido University in particular (though that can be done, if you think it would help!)

This fact has nothing to do with institution or country. And the degree of access enjoyed by an institution's researchers to the journal articles published by researchers at *other* institutions certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with either the degree of access to or the degree of impact of the articles published by that institution's own researchers! http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Second, I profoundly doubt that Hokkaido University has the money that no other university has, namely, enough money to provide immediate pay-per-view access to every single article on which its users ever click, if is not published in a journal to which HU already subscribes. If research universities had that kind of money, there would be no access problem and no need for OA.

> Last year and this year, journals have been much cheaper in JPY than in
> USD/EUR/GBP if the quotations are in the latter currencies, by the
> way.

Currency fluctuations may have been favourable, but the fact that immediate access to all or even most of the 2.5 million articles per year published by the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals is not affordable to any institution on the planet, not even the richest, is a rather fundamental one, unlikely to be reversed by currency fluctuations...

> One of Andrew's statements is not correct. He says that the university
> provides direct payment for individual item access costs when
> Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under the
> existing subscription, but this is not true. The university directly
> only pays for site licenses. When a researcher needs an article in an
> unsubscribed journals, he can request a photocopy of the article
> through the library just in the same way as in the rest of the world.
> The cost for the photocophy and postage(!) is not covered by the
> library budget, though. Each researcher has pay from their own
> research fund. Students may have to pay from their own
> pockets. Needless to say, the univesity or library does not pay for
> any pay-per-view articles downloaded.

I rather suspected this. (Hence my tongue-in-cheek comment about a user's every click.) But this simply makes the currency fluctuation argument -- and the implication that Japan has no access problem -- even less plausible. (In fact, this misconception just one of the many misconceptions -- at least 38 of them on last count -- that are keeping authors' fingertips paralyzed, instead of doing the few keystrokes it takes to deposit. It's #29, called "Sitting Pretty." And it has been circulating for over a decade, regardless of currency fluctuations... http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#29.Sitting )

In sum, Japan needs -- and can adopt -- Green OA self-archiving mandates no more nor less feasibly than every other research-active country on the planet.

I hope Open Access week 2010 will be the time when this token at last drops, not only in Japan, but worldwide. (But I must confess that I had hoped much the same thing at last year's OA week...)

Best wishes,

Stevan

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

> Dear all,
>
>> Many thanks to Andrew for pointing out my pre-emptive error (in
>> sniffing out Gold Fever)! No, Hokkaido University is not paying
>> pre-emptively for Gold Open Access. It is merely (like all
>> universities) paying for subscription access and (like all but 100
>> universities so far) limiting the potential impact of its own
>> research output as well its own users' access to the research output
>> of other universities published in journals to which it cannot
>> afford to subscribe. So (like all universities that have not yet
>> done so) the only thing Hokkaido needs to do now is to mandate the
>> Green OA self-archiving of its own research output. That done, all
>> else will take care of itself, as a natural matter of course...
>
> If I may, I would like to add, as part of the Japanese repository
> community, that it has consciously kept away from Gold Open Access
> Fever or whatever you make call it. It has been working on "voluntary
> though assisted" self-archiving through collaboration with the faculty
> and reseachers rather than implementing the mandated depositing . Yes,
> it has maybe just reached the baseline deposit rate but we believe
> that it is not tactically wise to rush and shout for the mandate in
> the atomsphere of the Japanese campus politics, which I don't to like
> to detail in a short message. We still believe that advocacy should
> work. Hokkaido is, in a sense, unique that mandating is openly
> discussed on campus for reasons I don't know.
>
> A couple of factual comments: Generally speaking, Hokkaido University
> has virtually no problem about accessing but it not confirmed yet that
> it has lost impact because the researchers there have not deposited
> enough or because they have not published in OA journals. Last year
> and this year, journals have been much cheaper in JPY than in
> USD/EUR/GBP if the quotations are in the latter currencies, by the
> way.
>
> One of Andrew's statements is not correct. He says that the university
> provides direct payment for individual item access costs when
> Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under the
> existing subscription, but this is not true. The university directly
> only pays for site licenses. When a researcher needs an article in an
> unsubscribed journals, he can request a photocopy of the article
> through the library just in the same way as in the rest of the world.
> The cost for the photocophy and postage(!) is not covered by the
> library budget, though. Each researcher has pay from their own
> research fund. Students may have to pay from their own
> pockets. Needless to say, the univesity or library does not pay for
> any pay-per-view articles downloaded.
>
> Syun Tutiya
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Syun Tutiya
> Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, Chiba University
> Address: Faculty of Letters, Chiba University
> 1-33 Yayoicho, Inageku, Chiba, Chiba, 263-8522 JAPAN
> Email: tutiya @ kenon.l.chiba-u.ac.jp
> Web: http://cogsci.l.chiba-u.ac.jp/~tutiya/