I think there has been a vast overstatement and overselling of the alleged need for -- and urgency of -- re-use rights (CC-BY) for peer reviewed research journal articles today, especially in view of the fact that CC-BY is much harder to get journal publishers to agree to, today, and not all (perhaps not even most) authors and disciplines need or want CC-BY, today.
More re-use rights (Libre OA) -- just like Gold OA -- will come, where needed and wanted, after we have grasped the 100% Green Gratis OA that is already within our reach, today. But neither Libre nor Gold OA is even remotely as important or urgent as (Gratis) OA itself is, today: free online access to the journal articles of which 80% are accessible only to subscribers today.
Green OA is the solution to the problem of providing the missing 80% of OA. All that's needed is to mandate it.
But insisting now on Libre OA (further re-use rights), just like insisting now on Gold OA, is simply demanding still more, and thereby raising higher the obstacles to getting the 80% Green OA (Gratis) that is already within reach and has been for years through Green (Gratis) OA self-archiving mandates by researchers' institutions and funders (as so brilliantly described and spear-headed by Professor Bernard Rentier in his recent GOAL posting).
And all in the name of further benefits that are not even remotely as important, urgent or reachable as Green Gratis OA.
Consider that there is a practical contradiction between trying to scale up the adoption of Green OA mandates by funders and institutions to 100% today while insisting on Libre OA (e.g., CC-BY) today.
For not one of the world's Green OA mandates, whether funder of institutional, is a Libre OA mandate -- and with good reason: Green OA mandates are a research-community adaptation to the publisher status quo:
Publication is still largely subscription-based today, and copyright is mostly being transferred to publishers (rather than being non-exclusively licensed, as we of course want it to be, eventually). That's the status quo.
And self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft is the research community's own self-help response, within this publisher status quo.
The result is Green Gratis OA; that is the thing that the research community needs the most today. That is what maximizes research access, uptake, usage, applications and impact by making it accessible to all users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access.
But Green Gratis OA is only at about 20% worldwide today, because so few institutions and funders have as yet mandated it.
Opening up the Libre OA front, alongside the Gold OA front, instead of pushing full-speed ahead on the all-important Green Gratis OA-mandating front toward 100% Green Gratis OA is simply adding further obstacles, handicaps and distractions to the Green Gratis OA front -- as well as providing an unscalable model that most other countries will not want (or be able) to follow today.
And the most important thing to keep in mind is that these further obstacles, handicaps and distractions are nowhere near as important and urgent as (Green, Gratis) OA itself. (Not to mention that the fastest and surest way to reach eventual Libre OA as well as Gold OA is to first mandate Green Gratis OA universally.)
I think it would be practical, realistic and helpful to make it clear to OA advocates today that the primary, immediate, and already fully reachable target is 100% Green Gratis OA, and that the re-use rights and the Gold OA can and will come later, after this urgent primary goal is reached, whereas it will only make it gratuitously harder to reach this urgent primary goal if Libre or Gold OA are needlessly insisted upon in advance.
A word to the wise.
I close by [log in to unmask]">re-quoting the spot-on and timely words of Professor Rentier in his recent GOAL posting, about the second practical policy compromise (immediacy) that first needs to be made in order to reach 100% Green Gratis OA (emphasis added):
"...I have mandated deposit in my University's repository (ORBi) and since there is no way I can force my colleagues to "obey", I have [simply] made official a procedure whereby the only publication list being considered in a Liege University member's C.V. is the one produced by ORBi. Simple. This explains ORBi's success... Of course, this does not solve the question of immediate open access. Only those papers published by publishers who agree upon immediate access on line are immediately accessible on line. The others must be immediately deposited but cannot be seen fully upon publication. They must await the end of the publishing house's embargo period, 6 months for most of them. Meanwhile, the title and metadata appear on any search engine by keywords, authors' names, University, etc. and a single click sends [an immediate eprint] request to the author. There are a few minutes to a few hours before the final author version is sent: it depends on the author's availability and response time. Usually less that 24 hours unless the author is on a weeklong trek in Nepal.... Compliance... has been very high, at first because of the soft but firm coercive top down pressure, but nowadays because our authors have fully realised the very much larger readership with which OA provides them and the citation advantage from which they benefit. My most reluctant colleagues have now become ORBi's best advocates. I consider this a success. OA's worst enemy out there is OA [fundamentalism]…"
Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model
The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment procedures
EOS: New worldwide organization for universities promoting open access
Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?
Liege Mandate Definitely Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access
It can be very good to convene a fresh set of minds to tackle the ways to get to open access. However, the most important point is to avoid —and reverse — the watering down of what open access is and why it is important. The simple message that open access means that one can do anything one likes with scholarly publications as long as the author is acknowledged has been lost in the, at times revisionist, discussions about expediency, concessions to the concept of open access, re-labelling and proliferation of qualifiers, etc. "Back to basics" is my device.Some disambiguation and comments interleaved in the message to the 'perplexed reader' below.At the BOAI in 2001, the term "open" was deliberately chosen to avoid the impression that 'free' (= gratis) is enough. The Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read) says: "By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."On 13 Jul 2012, at 15:21, Stevan Harnad wrote:FOR THE PERPLEXED GOAL READER:For the perplexed reader who is wondering what on earth all this to and fro on GOAL is about:1. Gratis Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles.The "crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose" seems subsequently to have fallen out of the equation. However, it is essential for academic literature to be called "Open Access". The term Open Access now appears to have been reduced to essentially 'free' (gratis) access, exactly what we sought to avoid at the BOAI meeting in 2001.'Libre OA' is tautological, as 'open' is already 'libre'. The perceived need for a term like 'libre access' has only come about because of the adulteration of the originally intended meaning of 'open access'.2. Libre OA means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles + certain re-use rights (often CC-BY).Green OA doesn't exist. Gold OA neither. OA is (should be, and was, before it was tampered with) unambiguous. 'Green' and 'gold' are just ways that lead to OA. Tactics, if you wish. Confusion about the goal and the means to reach the goal has reigned for almost a decade now, to the detriment of a clear vision of the goal. The way to the goal has become far more important in the discussions than the goal itself. That has to be remedied.3. Green OA means OA provided by authors self-archiving their peer-reviewed final drafts free for all online (either in the author's institutional repository or website or in an institution-external central repository)To repeat: gold OA doesn't exist, and green OA neither. Gold is one of the means to reach the goal and it mainly involves a shift away from financing publishing with subscriptions and replacing it by financing with subsidies, either 'by the drink' via author-side article processing fees or directly to the journals by institutional, governmental, or funding agency subsidies of some kind.4. Gold OA means OA provided by authors publishing in OA journals that provide free online access to their articles (Gratis or Libre), often at the cost of an author publication fee.Apart from the fact that gold OA doesn't exist, the so-called gold method to achieve OA is almost all real OA, i.e. 'libre', and not just free (gratis). The output of PLoS, BMC, Hindawi, Springer Open and hybrid, OUP open and hybrid, is all true OA ('libre'), so the statement that "almost all gold OA is gratis rather than libre" needs serious substantiation to say the least.5. Global OA today stands at about 20% of yearly journal article output, though this varies by discipline, with some higher (particle physics near 100%) and some lower (chemistry among the lowest).6. About two thirds of the global 20% OA is Green and one third is Gold. Almost all of it is Gratis rather than Libre."(Reluctantly) allowing" is not the same as "endorsing". As for embargoes, the biggest mistake made in the original BOAI statement is to leave out the word 'immediate'.7. Institutions and funders that mandate Green OA have much higher Green OA rates (70%+), but only if they have effective Green OA mandates -- and only a tiny proportion of the world's institutions and funders mandate OA as yet have Green OA mandates at all.8. Ineffective Green OA mandates are the ones that require self-archiving only if and when the publisher endorses self-archiving: 60% of journals endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving; 40% ask for embargoes of varying in length from 6-12 months to 5 years or indefinitely.Another confusing acronym introduced here, in which even OA means something other than Open Access. It almost appears as if confusing researchers has become the goal. What is needed is a dramatically simplified message: "Open Access means that you can do anything with an article as long as you acknowledge the original author".9. Effective Green OA mandates (ID/OA: Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) are the ones that require immediate deposit of all articles, but if the publisher has an OA embargo, access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access" during the allowable embargo period (preferably no more than 6 months).Well, why not. "Almost-OA", "Gold OA", "Green OA", "ID/OA", "Gratis OA", "Libre OA" — not seeing the forest for the trees.10. During any embargo, the institutional repository has an automated email-eprint-request button that allows users to request a copy for research purposes with one click, and allows the author to comply with one click. (This is not OA but "Almost-OA".)This may well be the case, or it may not. In any event, it makes sense to prepare for the golden way to support OA.11. The rationale for ID/OA + the Almost-OA button is to ensure that 100% of papers are immediately deposited and accessible for research purposes, not just the 60% that have publisher endorsement.12. The expectation is that once ID/OA is mandated globally by 100% of institutions and funders, not only will it provide 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA, but it will hasten the end of OA embargoes, as the power and utility of OA become evident, familiar and indispensable to all researchers, as authors and users.There are additional details about optimal mandates. (Deposit should be designated the sole procedure for submitting publications for institutional performance review, and funders should mandate convergent institutional deposit rather than divergent institution-external deposit.)And the further expectation is that once Gratis Green OA is mandated by institutions and funders globally, it will hasten the advent of Libre OA (CC-BY) and Gold OA.Much of the frustration is self-inflicted by muddying the waters, where crystal clear water is needed.All the frustration and complaints being vented in the recent GOAL postings are with the lack of OA. But frustration will not bring OA. Only mandates will. And the optimal mandate is ID/OA, even if it does not confer instant global OA.First things first. Don't let the unreachable best get in the way of the reachable better. Grasp what is already within reach.Stevan HarnadOn Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 3:48 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <[log in to unmask]> wrote:On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <[log in to unmask]> wrote:On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Stevan may well be right that the repository of the U of Liege (ORBi) contains 3,620 chemistry papers. But apart from posters, most deposits of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and even theses, are marked "restricted access" and not accessible to me, and 'libre' access seems completely out of scope. So if this is the best example of a successful OA repository, Peter Murray-Rust can be forgiven for getting the impression that compliance is essentially zero, in terms of Open Access.
I am generalizing from a sample of one in Liege (ORBIS) . This says:
Reference: Ivanova, T. et al - (2012) - Preparation and characterisation of Ag incorporated Al2O3 nanocomposite films obtained by sol-gel method [ handle:2268/127219 ]Document(s) requested:Tanya-CRT47-579.pdf - Publisher postprintThe desired document is not currently available on open access. Nevertheless you can request an offprint from the author(s) through the form below. If your request is accepted you will receive by email a link allowing you access to the document for 5 days, 5 download attempts maximum.
...
The University expressly draws your attention to the fact that the electronic copy can only be used for the strict purposes of illustration and teaching and academic and scientific research, as long as it is not for the purposes of financial gain, and that the source, including the author’s name is indicated.
So If I am a small business creating science-based work I am not allowed the "Open Access" from Liege. If I represent a patient group I am not allowed this material. If I am in government making eveidence-based policy I am not allowed it. It is the pernicious model that only academics need and can have access to the results of scholarship.
As I have said before University repositories seem to delight in the process of restricting access.
No wonder that no-one will use this repo. All it seems to do is mail the author and I can do that anyway (presumably if the author leaves the uni then the email goes nowhere).
In today's market any young reseacher will use #icanhazpdf instead. I am not condoning #icanhazpdf but I am far more sympathetic to it than repos.
But I have been told to shut up and I will. I'm slightly disappointed that no-one is prepared to consider the possibility we should do something different.
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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