More on the Author Addendum Kerfuffle

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:03:36 -0400

An update of Harvard computer scientist Michael Merzinich's "The ACM
Does NOT Support Open Access" (discussed hereyesterday) reports that
ACM has made it clear it is fully Green on OA self-archiving, but
that discussions with Harvard are still underway for the extra re-use
rights stipulated in the Author's Addendum.

The nuances here are about the differences between "gratis" OA (free
online access) and "libre" OA (free online access plus certain
further re-use rights).

I will make no secret of what my own view on this is -- and I've been
at this for a very, very long time: Free online access ("gratis OA")
is all you need in order to make all the rest happen. The rest will
come with the territory, eventually; but the territory must come
first. Gratis OA can be and is being mandated by universities and
funders (but so far there are only 77 mandates, out of a potential
worldwide total of 10,000 or more).

Libre OA asks for more, and entails more complications. Hence the
right strategy is to stick to mandating Gratis OA for now. Gratis OA
is urgent; addenda can wait. The "Green" journals that have already
formally endorsed providing immediate Gratis OA (63%) are on the side
of the angels. It is foolish and counterproductive to demonize them.
If one wants to rant at journals, rant at the pale-green ones, that
only endorse self-archiving unrefereed preprints, and that embargo
Gratis OA to the refereed postprints (34%); or the gray journals,
that don't endorse any form of self-archiving at all (3%).

Libre OA will come, as surely as day follows night, once we have
reached universal Green Gratis OA. To insist on over-reaching instead
for Libre OA now (by insisting on Libre OA author addenda), instead
of grasping the Green Gratis OA that is already within our reach (yet
still not being grasped by 99.937% of the universities and funders on
the planet) is just one of a long litany of gratuitous mistakes we
keeping making over and over, needlessly delaying the optimal,
inevitable, obvious and long overdue outcome, year upon year.

The "over-reaching" list is long, and includes the sublime and the
ridiculous: Libre OA (re-publishing and re-use rights for refereed
journal articles, when Green Gratis OA would already have them online
free for any user webwide, 24/7), Gold OA publishing, central (rather
than institutional) self-archiving, the publisher's PDF (rather than
just the author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft),
peer-review reform, publishing reform, copyright reform, freeing all
"knowledge" (rather than just freeing all of refereed research
first), solving "the" digital preservation problem, solving "the"
online search problem, etc. etc.

Mark my words. We will no doubt continue this fruitless frenzy of
over-reaching in all directions for some time to come (world hunger
may be next on the OA agenda) instead of doing the immediately doable
(which is the mandating of universal Green Gratis OA by all
universities and all funders), but in the end it will become clear
that in order to have all the good things worth having among the
things that can be nontrivially linked to OA, all we ever had to do
was those those simple 99,937 GG mandates (plus the distributed
volley of keystrokes they entail). 

Suggested Exercise: 
Test What Already Comes with the Gratis Green OA Territory:

"Re-use rights for teaching" are as good example as any of how people
are simply not thinking through what really comes with the territory
with Gratis Green OA:

If you deposit your article, free for all, in Harvard's Institutional
Repository (IR), every teacher and every student webwide has 24/7
access to it -- can link to it, read it on-screen, download it, print
it off, data-crunch it.

The days of permissions and "course packs" (for refereed journal
articles) would be over -- completely over -- if all universities and
funders mandated that all their employees' and fundees' refereed
journal articles (the authors' final refereed drafts) were deposited
in their IRs, thereby making them Gratis Green OA (the kind ACM
endorses).

Now try that out as an intuition pump with some of the other things
you thought you desperately needed the Author's Addendum for, over
and above GG OA...

There will be a few -- a very few. But none of them will be remotely
as important and urgent as Gratis Green OA itself. Yet here we are,
holding up GG OA because we are holding for and haggling over
needless Author's Addenda instead of working to universalize vanilla
GG OA.

And even the very few uses that don't come immediately with the GG OA
territory will follow soon after, once we have reached or neared
universal GG OA.

First things first... Or, Let not the better Best stand in the way of
the (immeasurably) Better...

Amen.

Now back to the soothing fulminations against ACM for not immediately
conceding the re-use rights that the author-addendum mandates are
needlessly insisting upon...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Received on Thu Apr 30 2009 - 22:04:19 BST