Stevan-
Your definition of open access
"OA means FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE"
leaves out a crucial component - namely the rights of reuse and
redistribution. This is clearly spelled out in the BOAI definition:
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."
> I completely agree with Mike that all freely-accessible full-text journal
> articles should be counted, but I don't think it is giving them their
> proper due to decline to count them as "truly" OA! Unless, of course,
> they fail to meet the full OA definition:
>
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE
[snip]
> But there is also an important logical point which Mike seems to have
overlooked:
> If a journal provides the following for *all* of its articles:
>
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE
>
> on its own journal website or PubMed Central's, then that is OA journal
> publishing ("gold"), not OA self-archiving ("green")! The "self" in
> "self-archiving" is the author (and the author's institution). It
> does not help us provide clarity and understanding to conflate the two
> components of the unified OA provision strategy by failing to distinguish
> OA provision by the journal (OA publishing, gold) from OA provision by the
> author/institution (OA-self-archiving, green).
>
> I think it is Mike's spurious free/open distinction that allows him to
> fail to make this absolutely fundamental distinction between the two
> complementary components of the unified OA strategy.
>
You may think this is free/open distinction is spurious, but in doing so you
have to acknowledge you are redfining open access in contrast to the way it
is definied in BOAI, Bethesda, Berlin, etc... And you are at odds with many
open access supporters who feel that reuse and redistribution are as, if not
more, important than free access. There rights are a critical part of open
access - otherwise we would just call it free access.
So, I would like us to use a more accurate definitions:
Free Access (FA) means FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE
FULL-TEXTS ONLINE
OA means FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE AND THE RIGHT TO REDISTRIBUTE AND REUSE WORKS LIMITED ONLY BY PROPER
ATTRIBUTION
This is not simply a semantic distinction.
I would also like to point out that this has some ramifications for how we
think about self-archived content. Placing something on in an institutional
archive may make it freely available, but it doesn't make it OA. In most
cases copyright on the self-archived work remains with the authors and/or
journal, and permission must be obtained to reuse or redistribute the works.
I in no way mean this to be an argument against self-archiving - just a
recognition that the way we define OA is important, and that self-archiving
is not sufficient to provide OA unless the copyright holders also grant
potential users redistribution and reuse rights. Maybe we need to
distinguish self-archiving as currently practiced from open-access
self-archiving in which works are placed in self-archives AND the copyright
holders license them with the Creative Commons Attribution License
(
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/).
-Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2003 6:46 AM
Subject: Re: Journals > Peer-Reviewed Journals > Open-Access Journals < Open
Access
> Michael Eisen's point is fundamental enough to be worth considering very
> explicitly and with considerable attentiveness. I hope many voices will
> make themselves heard on this, because what is at issue goes to the
> heart of open access provision itself and what can be done to provide
> maximum open access right now. (Please note the "right now" because it
> is at the heart of the issue, open access being already long overdue.)
>
> There is nothing hard to understand here, but there are several things
> that need to be kept clearly and explicitly in mind, in order to avoid
> needless misunderstandings (and the lost opportunities for open access
> provision that results from them).
>
> In what follows,
>
> OA = Open Access
>
> TA = Toll Access
>
> and OA means:
>
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE
>
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3223.html
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess
>
> In approximate numbers, we are taking about how to provide OA, in the
above sense,
> to the yearly 2,500,000 articles that appear in the planet's 24,000
peer-reviewed
> journals (across all disciplines and languages).
>
> Before I proceed to a point-by-point commentary on Mike's posting, I will
> reproduce it in full. But before that I will provide a succinct summary
> of my reply. Here it is:
>
> There is only one, unified OA provision strategy: "Publish your
> article in an OA journal if a suitable one exists, otherwise
> publish your article in a suitable TA journal and also self-archive
> it." There is no competition between these two components; they
> are complementary. The discussion below is only about what is
> the immediate scope for each component today. All are agreed that both
> components are underutilized. The only disagreement is about *how
> much* each component is underutilized. The disagreement would
> be immediately mooted if the advocates of each component always
> explicitly advocated their own component as only one part of the
> unified OA provision strategy: "Publish your article in an OA journal
> if a suitable one exists otherwise publish your article in a suitable
> TA journal and also self-archive it."
>
> First, here is Mike's comment in full:
>
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Michael Eisen wrote:
>
> > I think Sally is absolutely correct that less than 2.5% of published
content
> > is published in open access journals, but that doesn't count the large
> > amount of material that is made freely available by fee-for-access
> > publishers through their own websites or through PubMed Central. I, of
> > course, don't count this later class as being truly open access, but it
is
> > as available as self-archived content and should be given its proper
due.
> >
> > I would also like to object, once again, to Stevan's continued use of
this
> > 5% open access / 95% self-archiving number. It's grossly unfair to
contrast
> > reality (<5% of articles currently published in open access journals) on
> > one side with potential (that 95% - or more accurately something like
50% -
> > of articles COULD be self-archived). With BMC's diverse collection of
> > journals, PLoS, and the many other open-access publishers in DOAJ
(including
> > high-end journals like PLoS Biology, J. Biol, JCI, BMJ) virtually any
> > biomedical research article could be published in an open-access journal
> > today.
> >
> > Thus, most authors - many, many more than the 5% you imply - who want to
> > make their work freely available have a choice - they can publish it in
a
> > "green" fee-for-access journal and self-archive it, or they can publish
in
> > an open access "gold" journal. They may have reasons to choose the
former
> > route, and there is certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to
make
> > open access journals more appealing, but let's stop implying that the
open
> > access journal option wasn't available.
>
> I now reply point by point:
>
> > I think Sally is absolutely correct that less than 2.5% of published
content
> > is published in open access journals, but that doesn't count the large
> > amount of material that is made freely available by fee-for-access
> > publishers through their own websites or through PubMed Central. I, of
> > course, don't count this latter class as being truly open access, but it
is
> > as available as self-archived content and should be given its proper
due.
>
> I completely agree with Mike that all freely-accessible full-text journal
> articles should be counted, but I don't think it is giving them their
> proper due to decline to count them as "truly" OA! Unless, of course,
> they fail to meet the full OA definition:
>
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE
>
> "Is there any need for a universal Open Access label?"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3223.html
>
> They could fail to meet that definition not only by failing to be free, or
> failing to be refereed journal articles, or failing to be full-texts
online.
> They could also fail by not being immediate or by not being permanent. (A
> journal that makes its contents free online after a delayed embargo period
of 6
> months to 2 years or more is certainly no OA journal. Nor is a journal
that
> temporarily makes its contents free online as a from of advertisement, but
then
> removes them.)
>
> Harnad, S. (2001) AAAS's Response: Too Little,
> Too Late. Science dEbates [online] 2 April 2001.
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b
>
> Mike and I are agreed on this. We do disagree, however, on the free/open
> distinction (which I consider completely spurious):
>
> "Free Access vs. Open Access"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html
>
> But there is also an important logical point which Mike seems to have
overlooked:
> If a journal provides the following for *all* of its articles:
>
> FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS
ONLINE
>
> on its own journal website or PubMed Central's, then that is OA journal
> publishing ("gold"), not OA self-archiving ("green")! The "self" in
> "self-archiving" is the author (and the author's institution). It
> does not help us provide clarity and understanding to conflate the two
> components of the unified OA provision strategy by failing to distinguish
> OA provision by the journal (OA publishing, gold) from OA provision by the
> author/institution (OA-self-archiving, green).
>
> I think it is Mike's spurious free/open distinction that allows him to
> fail to make this absolutely fundamental distinction between the two
> complementary components of the unified OA strategy.
>
> To repeat: if the free access is delayed or temporary, I agree that that
is not
> OA. But otherwise it is OA, and should be counted as OA. Moreover, if it
is
> provided by the journal rather than the author, it should be credited to
OA
> journal-publishing and not to OA self-archiving.
>
> > I would also like to object, once again, to Stevan's continued use of
this
> > 5% open access / 95% self-archiving number. It's grossly unfair to
contrast
> > reality (<5% of articles currently published in open access journals) on
> > one side with potential (that 95% - or more accurately something like
50% -
> > of articles COULD be self-archived). With BMC's diverse collection of
> > journals, PLoS, and the many other open-access publishers in DOAJ
(including
> > high-end journals like PLoS Biology, J. Biol, JCI, BMJ) virtually any
> > biomedical research article could be published in an open-access journal
> > today.
>
> I do not contrast reality with potential. I contrast reality with reality,
> and potential with potential. The reality is that of the 2,500,000
articles
> published yearly in the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, about 10% of them
> are OA today: about 2.5% for having been published in an OA journal, and
about
> 7.5% for having been published in a TA journal and self-archived by its
author.
>
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif
>
> So the reality/reality contrast is 7.5%/2.5% or about three
> times as much OA provision via OA self-archiving, today, as via
> OA journal-publishing, today. These are estimates, and could be
> inaccurate, though it is far more likely that the OA self-archiving
> figure is an underestimate than that the OA journal article figure is
> an underestimate because there is no way yet to tally how many articles
> have been made OA by self-archiving on the author's arbitrary website
> (only the OAI-compliant archives are being systematically harvested, e.g.,
> by OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ -- but more general
> harvesters such as Citeseer http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs in computer
> science suggest that there might be a good deal more self-archived OA
> content out there) whereas we are closer to having a total tally of
> OA journals, and hence their contents, via the Directory of Open Access
> Journals in Lund http://www.doaj.org/ -- though, as this is growing daily,
> mostly with OA journals that have not yet made their existence known,
> the true total there could be higher than the current 600. It is for
> that reason that I have doubled the OA journal share estimate to 5%,
> to be conservative.
>
> But that was the (estimate of) the reality/reality contrast. Now what
> about the potential/potential contrast? Let us first agree that both
> components of the unified OA provision strategy are underutilized:
> There is definitely room for more articles in the existing c. 600 OA
> journals. And there is also definitely room for more OA articles in the
> existing OA archives. How much room? That is the potential/potential
> question.
>
> But let us agree that we are talking about realistic potential, and
> not pipe-dreams. It does not count as "potential" to suppose that all
> the remaining 23,400 TA journals have the "potential" to be persuaded to
> convert to OA! That is a logical possibility, but not much more than that,
> at this moment. I wish it were otherwise, but right now, the established
> TA journals are not inclined to convert to OA, and I am not inclined to
> wait for them to be persuaded to do so -- nor, I hope, is the rest of the
> research community inclined to wait for OA to come via that route alone.
> That is why we have the unified OA provision strategy: Because there
> is another route too, and it does not depend on the research community
> persuading the TA journal publishing community to provide OA for them,
> but on persuading the research community to provide OA for itself --
> by self-archiving its own TA articles.
>
> And I want to suggest that the potential for the research community to
> persuade *itself* to provide OA is far higher than the potential for the
> research community (or anyone else) to persuade the publishing community
> to provide it for them. I would say that the relative size of those two
> potentials is realistically reflected by the figures I suggested: 95%/5%
> (at this time: remember we are talking about the potential for *immediate*
> OA).
>
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif
>
> But there may be another sense of "potential" Mike and others have in
> mind: There is definitely room for more articles in the existing OA
> journals. But does anyone really believe that there is as much room in
> OA journals today, for today's daily/weekly/monthly article-output as
> there is in institutional archives, today? I would say that the difference
> is still an order of magnitude. But in any case, if that is the case --
> if 23,000 journals-worth of TA articles can already today be redirected to
> the 600 OA journals that exist today, so be it! That potential is fully
covered
> by our unified OA provision strategy:
>
> "Publish your article in an OA journal if a suitable one exists,
> otherwise publish your article in a suitable TA journal and also
> self-archive it."
>
> We should strongly encourage OA journal advocates to formally and
> explicitly promote this unified strategy, exactly as we encourage
> university administrators and research-funders to do so: The accent
> is on OA provision, today, by whichever way suits!
>
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif
>
> > 95% - or more accurately something like 50% -
> > of articles COULD be self-archived
>
> This is incorrect. What is correct is that 55% of journals sampled by
Romeo
> are either "blue/green" or "gold" -- i.e. already formally support author
> self-archiving. Many of the remaining 45% "white" journals will agree too,
if
> asked.
>
>
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm
>
> But even that increased percentage does not fully cover the "COULD" --
> as the 250,000 papers self-archived by physicists since 1991 attests:
> All those papers were self-archived *without asking* -- and in the 12
years
> only 4 or so of the 250,000 papers has been removed for copyright reasons!
>
> "Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3188.html
>
> > Thus, most authors - many, many more than the 5% you imply - who want to
> > make their work freely available have a choice - they can publish it in
a
> > "green" fee-for-access journal and self-archive it, or they can publish
in
> > an open access "gold" journal. They may have reasons to choose the
former
> > route, and there is certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to
make
> > open access journals more appealing, but let's stop implying that the
open
> > access journal option wasn't available.
>
> Dear Mike, I can hardly be described as implying that the open access
> journals option is not available, when it is trailed on every one of
> my postings, like a mantra, as a component of the unified gold/green
> OA-provision strategy! If the odds prove to be better than 5/95 of
> finding a suitable OA journal, that's fine with me! My figures merely
> represent the 600/23,400 ratio of OA/TA journals today. And the reason
> I keep pointing them out is that too many researchers still think the
> golden road is the *only* way to provide OA today -- whereas the truth
> is much closer to the opposite!
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
> NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
> access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
> the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
> Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
>
> Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
> BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
> journal whenever one exists.
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
> BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
> toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
> http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
>
Received on Sun Dec 14 2003 - 22:54:29 GMT
