Dear Stevan !
many thanks for your arguments which are higly appreciated to develop the OA policy in Austria further. All best, Falk __________________________________________________ Falk Reckling, PhD Social Science and Humanities / Strategic Analysis / Open Access Head of Units Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Sensengasse 1 A-1090 Vienna email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Tel.: +43-1-5056740-8301 Mobil: + 43-699-19010147 Web: http://www.fwf.ac.at/de/contact/personen/reckling_falk.html ________________________________ Von: [email protected] [[email protected]]" im Auftrag von "Stevan Harnad [[email protected]] Gesendet: Montag, 21. Mai 2012 19:16 An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: SPARC Open Access Forum; BOAI 10 meeting, post Betreff: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Mandates: Q&A with the NIH Dear Falk, First, I apologize for my school-masterish tone! On a planet which still has far too few OA mandates and too little OA, it cannot be repeated often enough that every single mandate is a step forward, and welcomed by all (in the research community!) But I hope you will agree that optimizing these first pioneering mandates is very important too, to provide a tested, successful model for others to follow. This is the reason for focusing here, in this discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the US's NIH mandate on the detailed breakdown of Austria's FWF mandate's compliance rate and the formal and implementational details that have been generating it. You have kindly provided some very important benchmark data in your previous postings: The compliance rate for the FWF mandate in its current form is 65%. Of this, half (32.5%) is Green OA self-archiving and half (32.5%) is from publishing in fee-based Gold OA journals, one third of them exclusively Gold OA (11%) and two thirds (22%) hybrid Gold (meaning the journal is still charges subscriptions, but authors can pay an additional fee to make their own individual article OA -- and FWF pays that extra fee). The global baseline rate for the annual *un-mandated* Green OA self-archiving rate worldwide is about 20% (although Yassine Gargouri will soon be reporting some new results suggesting that this worldwide un-mandated rate may have increased in the last few years). So it has to be admitted that the FWF mandate's net gain from raising the baseline un-mandated rate of 20% to 32.5% for Green OA self-archiving is not very great (and much smaller than the Green OA rate generated by other current mandates that may be formulated and implemented in ways that could help FWF increase its Green OA compliance rate too). The bulk of the OA generated by the FWF mandate (32.5%) comes from articles published in a Gold OA journal or in a subscription journal offering optional Gold OA publishing; FWF hence increases by 22.55 the global Gold OA baseline rate, which is under 10%. But this Gold OA increase, as you will agree, has been bought at a price -- up to 3000 euros per paper. I ask you to keep that figure in mind in some of the replies I make, below, to the points you have raised. It is also very important to know the discipline breakdown for Green and Gold compliance rates, because, as Andrew Adams has noted, PMC/UKPMC are just for biomedical research, and, as we all know, physicists have been self-archiving in Arxiv for over two decades at very high rates, un-mandated. Hence their contribution is not a result of the FWF mandate. On 2012-05-21, at 5:41 AM, Reckling, Falk, Dr. wrote: - In 2006 no Austrian institution had a mandate or an IR. Today only some Austrian institutions have an IR [Institutional Repository] but no one has an OA mandate. Austria's IR tally in 2006 and today, as well as Austria's mandate tally in 2006 and today are roughly comparable with those of other countries: Increase in the number of institutions with IRs (but with those IRs remaining near-empty) and still extremely few mandates (either from funders or from institutions) -- although Austria does seem to be unusually low in its number of IRs relative to its number of universities. So the question is: What can be done to generate more IRs and more mandates in Austria? This is precisely where the FWF can help, in three ways: (1) Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, *whether or not it is published as Gold OA*. (2) Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR. (3) Only offer to pay for Gold OA if those two conditions have been fulfilled. This will ensure that FWF fundees self-archive. It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the FWF OA mandate. It will motivate and facilitate fundees' institutions to adopt a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just FWF-funded research. It will ensure that most of the compliance with the FWF mandate is not just Gold OA paid for by FWF at 3000 euros per paper. By organizing a nationwide network we now try to tackle these problems. Before organizing a nationwide network instead of adopting the mandate conditions that induce institutions to create their own IRs, it would be well to look at the experience of France's HAL, which is a nation-wide repository just as empty as individual IRs that have not mandated deposit: http://bit.ly/HALoa Years more can be lost travelling down that garden path... (b) At the same time, we noted that a lot of Austrian scholars were/are voluntarily willing to deposit their articles in central disciplinary repositories like arxiv, Repec, SSRN, Citeseer or PMC. I have already replied about the profound denominator error you are making here. http://bit.ly/oaDenFal The un-mandated deposit rate for central disciplinary repositories is just as low as the un-mandated deposit rate for institutional repositories. The crucial factor is not the repository but the mandate. And convergent, collaborative mandates (from both institutions and funders) designating the author's IR as the locus of deposit will generate far more institutional mandates than divergent, conflicting ones, for the many reasons described. One also has to be careful how one counts one's central repositories: Arxiv, as noted, is one of the prominent exceptions to the global un-mandated Green OA self-archiving rate. Physicists self-archive in Arxiv, un-mandated, at a much higher rate than other disciplines. In over two decades, however, the only other discipline that seems to have followed the example of physicists un-mandated self-archiving) is mathematics. It would seem to be a strategic mistake to wait yet another two decades for un-mandated self-archiving to generalize to other disciplines, rather than just go ahead and mandate it. And there is a third prominent exception to the global un-mandated self-archiving rate (20% overall, but much closer to 100% for physics and maths, in Arxiv) and that is computer science, which has been doing high rates of Green OA self-archiving without needing to be mandated to do so -- but they have not been depositing" in Citeseer (which is not a repository at all, but a harvester): Computer scientists have been self-archiving on their own institutional websites (since long before IRs were invented). But their admirable un-mandated practice has not generalized in over two decades either. Citeseer does provide a good case in point, though, for the power and efficacy of central harvesting, navigation and search across distributed local deposits. Google and Google Scholar are further examples of the power and functionality of central harvesting across webwide distributed contents: one does not deposit centrally in google. There are more examples of central harvesting and navigation/search over distributed content. But there is no point in further developing the potential of metadata harvesting and functionality while OA content is still so sparce. That, again, is what OA mandates are for -- and why it is so important to optimize them, so they maximize compliance and OA. (c) With BMC, PLoS and others the need for covering APC arose. And we found it useful to support an alternative business model, as other renown institutions did, see: http://www.oacompact.org/ , Paying the additional costs of Gold OA article processing charges (APCs) is fine, if one has already done what is needed to maximize *all* OA generated by one's OA mandate (and one has the spare cash). But (it seems to me), it is very far from fine to spend all that extra money without first having done what is needed to maximize all OA generated by the mandate. (d) I do not agree with your position that Gold OA is costly and Green OA is nearly for free. In practice, Green OA costs a lot of time and money for creating repositories, establishing mandates, having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers, e.g. I would be very grateful to see what actual costs you have in mind. Like the denominator fallacy, it is crucial here to compare like with like. Gold OA costs are from 500-3000 euros *per paper*. IR software casts nothing, server space costs next to nothing, IR one-time set-up time is a few days of sysad work, and annual IR maintenance is a few more days of sysad work, per year. IRs are set up for a variety of reasons, not just OA, but let us pretend as if the IR costs are just OA costs: How much do you think that adds up to, per paper deposited? (And bear in mind that adopting a mandate costs nothing, and greatly increases the number of papers deposited, hence decreases the cost per paper.) Yes, extra money can be spent, and is being spent, on "having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers [in place of authors]". But the very same thing can be said about these additional expenditures as what was just said about expenditures on Gold OA fees: It's fine to spend this extra money if you have the extra cash -- but not if you have not adopted a mandate that will maximize self-archiving. Most IRs are spending all this money *without* a mandate (since most IRs don't have a mandate, let alone an optimized one). So we are again speaking apples and oranges, if we try to rationalize spending scarce cash on Gold OA instead of optimizing our OA mandate in the direction of institutional Green OA self-archiving on the grounds that IRs are costly: If the costs of Green OA and Gold OA are compared on a per-paper basis (as they need to be, to make sense), there is no contest: Green OA is incomparably cheaper, and Green OA mandates generate incomparably more OA. That might give you some reasons why we find, for example, that UKPMC offers a very good option to solve some these problems UKPMC, a central repository for UK biomedical research, populated mostly by funder mandates, does not even address the matter at hand here, which is about ways to optimize those funder mandates so that they will generate more OA. The UK too, like Austria (and the US) would benefit from much greater funder mandate compliance and would also generate many more complementary institutional mandates were it to: (1) Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, *whether or not it is published as Gold OA*. (2) Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR. (3) Only offer to pay for Gold OA if those two conditions have been fulfilled. This will ensure that fundees self-archive. It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with tfunder OA mandate. It will motivate and facilitate fundees' institutions to adopt a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just funded research. It will ensure that most of the compliance with the funder mandate is not just Gold OA paid for at 3000 euros per paper. Finally, we see no contradiction to support both Green and Gold the same time, but we think in the end a change of the business model should be envisaged. Green OA self-archiving has to be made universal first, by both funder and institutional mandates, both designating institutions as the locus of deposit. That will generate 100% (Green) OA. That, in turn, will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable, reduce costs, and induce a conversion to Gold OA, while also freeing institutional subscription funds to pay for it. All the best, Stevan Harnad ________________________________ Von: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [[email protected]]" im Auftrag von "Stevan Harnad [[email protected]] Gesendet: Sonntag, 20. Mai 2012 21:06 An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: SPARC Open Access Forum; BOAI 10 meeting, post Betreff: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Mandates: Q&A with the NIH Dear Falk, I profoundly hope that you are communicating with us on GOAL open-mindedly, with a view to gaining information you perhaps did not have, and with a readiness to revise policy if a valid case can be made for the fact that it would help. Because all too often, I have alas found, those who come to OA policy-making tend to make some initial judgments and decisions, implement them, and then when either practical experience itself, or those who have more and longer experience in OA and OA policy, call into question those initial judgments and decisions, the response is: "My mind's made up, don't annoy me with facts!" and the initial policy simply becomes more and more firmly entrenched, regardless of the consequences. It is too early for such rigidity, Falk. And Andrew and I (and many others) are trying to explain to you what is amiss with both the FWF policy and the rationales that you are voicing here. You wrote: On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 8:43 AM, Reckling, Falk, Dr. <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Stevan, Andrew, a) [1] an IR has to exist and that is often not the case. [2] And if an IR exists it is often not used, [3] mandate or not. [4] Here some central disciplinary respositories are much more successfull as PMC/UKPMC. 1. Many, many institutions have repositories, and those that do not yet have one are merely a free piece of software and a server sector away form having one. 2. Yes, almost all existing repositories are unused (at least 80% of annual institutional refereed research output is not deposited). But *that is the point*! That's precisely why deposit mandates are needed. 3. It is an enormous factual error, however, to say that institutional repositories are unused whether or not they have a mandate. Again, that is the whole point. There is abundant evidence that institutions that mandate deposit are not near 80% empty but near 80% full! (And especially when they have adopted the optimal ID/OA mandate of U. Liege.) 4. It is also an enormous factual error to state that central repositories like PMC/UKPMC are exceptions to the 20/80 rule (i.e., that only 20% of total research output is deposited un-mandated). The total research output of an institution is all the refereed journal articles, in all disciplines, that its authors publish each year. The total research output of a central discipline-based repository is all the refereed journal articles published each year *by all authors in that discipline, in all institutions worldwide.* To imagine otherwise is to fall into the denominator fallacy --http://bit.ly/oaDenFal : The annual percentage use of a repository is the annual ratio of deposited articles to all target articles within its ambit. For an institution, the denominator is obvious, and easily estimated. For an entire discipline, it is far from obvious, but it too can be estimated. And I can assure you that the un-mandated Bio-Medical Research content of PMC/UKPMC is no higher than the global 20% baseline for all other disciplines. What gives the illusion that it is otherwise is two things, one trivial, one nontrivial: The trivial reason for this profound error and misconception is the simple fact that disciplines are much bigger than institutions. So the absolute number of articles in a disciplinary repository is much bigger than those in any institutional repository, even though their un-mandated content is just 20% in both cases. The nonrivial reason for this profound error is the fact that much of PMC/UKPMC content is *mandated* (by NIH, MRC, Wellcome Trust), and for that subset the percentage deposit is of course much higher -- *exactly as it is with institutional mandated content*. So the overall error is to conflate central repository content and mandated content, and incorrectly (and misleadingly) deduce that central repositories are doing better than institutional repositories because they are bigger and have more deposits. Reflection will show that it is *mandates* that generate deposits, not centrality or disciplinarity (irrespective of whether the mandates are institutional mandates or funder mandates). (The Physics Arxiv is the sole exception, where un-mandated deposits are close to 100%, and have been for two decades: But two decades is far too long to keep waiting in the hope that the physicists' spontaneous, un-mandated self-archiving practices would generalize to other disciplines: they have not. That's why the OA movement has moved toward supporting mandates.) And as several of us have now stated, the functionality of a central repository for navigation and search (which is certainly incomparably better than the functionality of any single institutional repository, where no one would ever dream of doing navigation and search) is fully preserved if the central repository harvests the metadata and links to the full-text from institutional repositories. The point being made here about the importance of ensuring that both institutional and funder mandates collaborate and converge on institutional deposit instead of diverging and competing is that it makes a huge practical difference -- both to the burden on authors and to the probability of persuading institutions (who are the universal providers of all refereed research, funded and funded, in all disciplines) to adopt deposit mandates of their own -- whether funders mandate institutional deposit or institution-external deposit: http://bit.ly/OAloc<http://bit.ly/OAloc> But Falk, you do not seem to be hearing this in these exchanges so far: you seem instead o return over and over to funding Gold OA fees rather than mandating Green OA. Is there any hope of drawing your attention to this much more fundamental and urgent question, on which the prospects of OA growth in upcoming years hinges? b) We believe that OA is better supported by the Gold road and therefore a change of the business model is needed. That means costs should be covered by APCs or institutions or mixed models. It is a great pity if you are rigidly committed to this belief, which is not only erroneous (for the many reasons we have been describing) but costly, because of the premature, pre-emptive focus on getting OA by paying Gold OA fees instead of by mandating Green OA -- and designating institutional repositories as the locus for direct deposit. If funders do that, institutions (the universal providers) will mandate Green OA too, and we will have 100% OA (Green). That will already solve the research accessibility problem, completely. But it is also the fastest and surest way to eventually convert journals to Gold OA (and liberate the subscription money to pay for it.) Solving the research access problem does not immediately solve the journal affordability problem too -- but does make it into a far less urgent, life/death matter (since with 100% Green OA, all users have access, whether or not journals are afforded or cancelled.) I profoundly hope you will set a good example for other policy-makers, by showing some open-mindedness, flexibility and reflection on these crucial questions. Best wishes, Stevan ________________________________________ Von: Andrew A. Adams [[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Gesendet: Sonntag, 20. Mai 2012 14:11 An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Reckling, Falk, Dr. Betreff: Re: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Mandates: Q&A with the NIH > > We think thatthe most important action right now is the national as well > international coordination: > > a) A lot of Austrian research institutions and universities have notyet > established an OA policy, repositories or publication funds for OA > publishing. Therefore, together with other institutions wecurrently try to > organise an Austrian network which implements and coordinates such activities. > > b) UKPMC is working hard to extend the consortium to evolve towards PMC > Europe. > > c) For ScienceEurope (the new umbrella organisation of all major European > research funders and research performing agencies) OA is one of the key > topics.Therefore, a working group is established which will formulate > recommendations for common actions (standards for funding APCs, incentives > for high-level OA journals, OA for research data, e.g.) > > The OA movement was characterized by institutional or country based examples > and experiments so far, which was in the sense of trial and error very > important. But to accelerate the development and to reach the tipping point, > we think it now needs more international cooperation and common standards. Falk, As the previous two UK administrations (Blair and Brown) found to their (political and UK taxpayers financial) immense cost, large centralised databases are very hard to develop, maintain and populate. If we consider the UK's NHS IT systems we see that a decade of attempts to put in place a single overall system has been precisely worse than useless. The main project delivered nothing of significant value and impeded local efforts because either they weren't started (why do something local when one is promised that something national is on the way) or because they were done but tried to keep up with the ever-moving chimera of the NPfIT. Institutional repositories are the natural scope for university-based research. The technology (eprint and dspace) is there, as is the interoperability (SWORD et al). The relatively smaller number of non-university researchers have options of the opendepot for non-affiliated researchers or the option of implementing the same technology as universities for other institutions (individually or as consortia). The side benefits to running one's own repository in terms of efficiency of promoting the institutions' research output, monitoring the output of staff (for promotion, funder mandate compliance and other purposes) should more than outweigh the costs of supporting a local repository, which are not large compared to the other systems that most universities operate (student registration databases, scientific computation services...). The vast majority of papers produced by any government research-body-funded research have at least one co-author at a research university or similar academic institution. The obvious move is to mandate local deposit, with compliance a requirement on the institution and the individual researcher (primarily the PI) who can be motivated by a requirement on future funding - as with the Liege model internally, only papers deposited full-text in the repository under an ID/OA setting can be considered as formal outputs and used to justify future funding applications. Central deposit can be automated using SWORD and a simple set of keywords (UKPMC for anything that should be deposited in there, for example). I find it strange that the simple logic of this escapes anyone considering how to move forward with OA from the funder side. Fund IRs instead of pre-emptive Gold/Hybrid fees and mandate local deposit (enforced by final report and future funding applications only being allowed to refer to IR deposited papers). Promote whatever central harvesting is useful for particular fields (medical research) automatically by simple keyword match. -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
