On 2012-05-10, at 4:43 AM, Jan Velterop wrote:

> I might be convinced by his core argument, and
> quite possibly other people on this list as well,
> if Stevan cum suis could come up with credible
> evidence that in order to get universities and
> funders to mandate deposit in what they call
> OA-repositories requires watering down OA
> and not sticking to what OA was meant to be
> according to the BOAI.

The evidence is that virtually all the c. 250 Green
OA mandates that have actually succeeded in getting
adopted to date (see ROARMAP) are for free online
access (Gratis OA) only, not for Libre (or "BOAI") OA.
http://roarmap.eprints.org

(The mandates are mostly also for the author's
final draft, not for the publisher's PDF.)

The reason is that all authors are for free online
access (at least), the majority of publishers
endorse (only) free online access (unembargoed)
and most of the remaining publishers endorse free
 online access (only) after an embargo.

As evidence that going against authors' preferences
makes it harder to get mandates adopted, several
mandates have been delayed or blocked because
authors wanted the publisher's PDF rather than their
own final drafts to be the drafts that were freely accessible
online.

(The solution was to explain to the authors why
"lowering the bar" to the author's final draft would
generate much more free access, and already made
a huge difference for access-denied users, whereas
persuading publishers who had already endorsed
immediate-Gratis Green OA to endorse Libre OA
would be a long, and possibly endless slog. A similar
rationale is used for "lowering the bar" to the most
successful and effective mandate model, ID/OA
[immediate deposit -- optional access] + "Almost-OA"
via the email-eprint-access Button for Closed Access
deposits during the embargo. There are all examples
of "lowering the bar" -- "reaching for the reachable" --
in order to get much more access for researchers,
rather than to continue to make do with access-denial
year in and year out, by holding out for the unreachable.)

I might add, without evidence, that I am certain that
the fastest, surest (and probably the only) way to reach
the currently unreachable (Libre OA, Gold OA, etc.) too
is to grasp for what is already within reach ("lower the bar").
Green Gratis OA itself, once it becomes universal, will be
what extends our reach, irreversibly.

(What follows is a response that I had meant to post to GOAL
yesterday, but inadvertently sent only to JISC-Repositories.)

Re-posted:

I apologize for dwelling on what to some members of the GOAL
forum and the JISC-Repositories list may seem to be minor or
irrelevant points. I would like to suggest that they are far from
being minor or irrelevant, but go to the very heart of what OA is,
what it's for, and how to make it happen:

On 2012-05-09, at 1:19 PM, Jan Velterop wrote:

> Of course the need for access isn't. What I'm
> saying is that just 'gratis' OA won't feel much
> like meaningful access to those who have to
> ingest amounts of papers that are impossible
> to ingest by unaided (by machine) reading.
> This is an interesting article that illustrates that:
> http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6815
> (not OA, unfortunately)

Jan, I think your reply does not address the
question I asked.. You made what looks like a
spurious dichotomy, between those who can
afford sufficient access and those who can't keep
up with the relevant literature.

That does not cover the relevant options.

There are those who can afford sufficient access
and those who cannot. And for those who cannot
afford sufficient access, providing Green Gratis OA
is most definitely providing "meaningful" access.

For those whose problem is not access but tools
to help them keep up with the relevant literature
-- note that this is not an access problem but a
filtering/alerting/search/navigation problem --
one can develop solutions without any reference
to OA. In fact, publishers and secondary indexers
will be happy to provide such services on the
full non-OA corpus. Publishers would be delighted
to form a consortium to help users navigate paid
content (in fact they are already beginning to do
it) -- especially if we would just stop the clamor
for OA (Gratis OA!).

So what is really at issue is whether Green Gratis OA
is indeed not "meaningful" enough to warrant "lowering
the bar" in order to mandate it.

According to Jan, it is not.

According to me, it most definitely is: in fact, it is the
first and foremost reason for providing OA at all.

What do other GOAL and JISC readers think?

(I am also willing to make a bet that once Green
Gratis OA mandates from institutions and funders
have generated enough OA content to make it worth
their while, a generation of bright doctoral students in
computer science and scientometrics will be more
than happy to provide filtering and navigation tools
beyond Jan's wildest dreams. And so will Google.
All that's missing is that Green Gratis OA content
that Jan does not find meaningful enough... See
citebase for the faintest of foretastes (crafted by
a Southampton doctoral student, Tim Brody, also
the architect of ROAR, and limited only by the
sparseness of OA content):
http://www.citebase.org/ )

Stevan Harnad