Suhail A. R wrote: > I finally understand what you imply by the "green" road to OA. But this then > brings up one general & one personal question: > > 1. Generally, lets face the fact, I found out specifics about the "green" > road to OA from this forum. Few in the research world take it seriously > because even though many have heard about it, few know what it means, much > less how to implement it. Why so?
I am afraid you still don't understand. The name "green" road may not be in common parlance, but "self-archiving" is, and self-archiving is done by even more authors than use the term "self-archiving": Please look at the data in the transparencies that were in the foregoing message: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif Do the authors of 250,000 self-archived articles in 2003 sound like few? Would you not say that *doing* it amounts, a fortiori, to "taking it seriously"? seriously enough to implement it? And look also at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0049.gif That is merely an (under)estimate of the annual proportion of articles that have been self-archived by their authors relative to the number that have been published in OA journals by their authors. As I said, the ratio is at least 3:1. So what is your point? My own point is that 250,000 self-archived articles in 2003, and a ratio of 3:1 are still nothing to crow about, because the total number of articles published in 2003 was about 2.5 million, and *that* is the target. If what you are saying is that the OA message (of either color) has not yet gotten through to the authors of *those* (non-OA) articles, you are quite right. But that is what this Forum is about! Getting that message out. > 2. Personally, lets predict the scenario into the next twenty to fifty > years, assuming problem 1 is rectified: Self archiving is well advanced. > Will TA journals not be forced to take the "Golden" road to OA due to > falling subscriptions? If so, are we not just postponing the inevitable for > the third world? Forgive me, Suhail, if in 2004, when there is a pressing Immediate Access Problem for at least 80% of the articles published, that I do not devote time and energy to speculating about what might or might not happen in 20-50 years! The Problem is the lack of access *now*. In 20-50 year, most of those lacking that access *now* will be dead. The immediate problem is providing that access for them *now*, so they can use those research findings *now* to build their own research upon (i.e., research impact). If you insist that I speculate, I can quote the speculations I have already made (and linked for you, in several previous replies) although I find them utterly beside the point at this time. Here they are, again, in longhand: 4.2 Hypothetical Sequel: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm Steps i-iv [see end] are sufficient to free the refereed research literature. We can also guess at what may happen after that, but these are really just guesses. Nor does anything depend on their being correct. For even if there is no change whatsoever -- even if Universities continue to spend exactly the same amounts on their access-toll budgets as they do now -- the refereed literature will have been freed of all access/impact barriers forever. However, it is likely that there will be some changes as a consequence of the freeing of the literature by author/institution self-archiving. This is what those changes might be: v. Users will prefer the free version? It is likely that once a free, online version of the refereed research literature is available, not only those researchers who could not access it at all before, because of toll-barriers at their institution, but virtually all researchers will prefer to use the free online versions. Note that it is quite possible that there will always continue to be a market for the toll-based options (on-paper version, publisher's on-line PDF, deluxe enhancements) even though most users use the free versions. Nothing hangs on this. vi. Publisher toll revenues shrink, Library toll savings grow? But if researchers do prefer to use the free online literature, it is possible that libraries may begin to cancel journals, and as their windfall toll savings grow, journal publisher tollrevenues will shrink. The extent of the cancellation will depend on the extent to which there remains a market for the toll-based add-ons, and for how long. If the toll-access market stays large enough, nothing else need change. vii. Publishers downsize to providers of peer-review service + optional add-ons products? It will depend entirely on the size of the remaining market for the toll-based options whether and to what extent journal publishers will have to down-size to providing only the essentials: The only essential, indispensable service is peer review. viii. peer-review service costs funded by author-institution out of reader-institution toll savings? If publishers can continue to cover costs and make a decent profit from the toll-based optional add-ons market, without needing to down-size to peer-review provision alone, nothing much changes. But if publishers do need to abandon providing the toll-based products and to scale down instead to providing only the peer-review service, then universities, having saved 100% of their annual access-toll budgets, will have plenty of annual windfall savings from which to pay for their own researchers' continuing (and essential) annual journal-submission peer-review costs (10-30%); the rest of their savings (70-90%) they can spend as they like (e.g., on books -- plus a bit for Eprint Archive maintenance). The above was the speculation you asked for. What follows here is the nonspeculative part. All of this has been tried (e.g., by the self-archiving authors listed above) and shown to work. It need only be implemented for the remaining c. 80% of the peer-reviewed research corpus: 4.1 Enough to free entire refereed corpus, forever, immediately: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm Eight steps will be described here. The first four are not hypothetical in any way; they are guaranteed to free the entire refereed research literature (~20K journals annually) from its access/impact-barriers right away. The only thing that researchers and their institutions need to do is to take these first four steps. The second four steps are hypothetical predictions, but nothing hinges on them: The refereed literature will already be free for everyone as a result of steps i-iv, irrespective of the outcome of predictions v-viii. i. Universities install and register OAI-compliant Eprint Archives (http://www.eprints.org) The Eprints software is free and will be open-sourced. It in turn uses only free software; it is quick and easy to install and maintain; it is OAI-compliant and will be kept compliant with every OAI upgrade: http://www.openarchives.org/. Eprints Archives are all interoperable with one another and can hence be harvested and searched (e.g., http://arc.cs.odu.edu/) as if they were all in one global "virtual" archive of the entire research literature, both pre- and post-refereeing. ii. Authors self-archive their pre-refereeing preprints and post-refereeing postprints in their own university's Eprint Archives. This is the most important step; it is insufficient to create the Eprint Archives. All researchers must self-archive their papers therein if the literature is to be freed of its access- and impact-barriers. Self-archiving is quick and easy; it need only be done once per paper, and the result is permanent, and permanently and automatically uploadable to upgrades of the Eprint Archives and the OAI-protocol. iii. Universities subsidize a first start-up wave of self-archiving by proxy where needed. Self-archiving is quick and easy, but there is no need for it to be held back if any researcher feels too busy, tired, old or otherwise unable to do it for himself: Library staff or students can be paid to "self-archive" the first wave of papers by proxy on their behalf. The cost will be negligibly low per paper, and the benefits will be huge; moreover, there will be no need for a second wave of help once the palpable benefits (access and impact) of freeing the literature begin to be felt by the research community. Self-archiving will become second-nature to all researchers as the objective digitometric indicators of its effects on citations and useage become available online (Harnad 2001e; Lawrence 2001a, 2001b) (e.g., cite-base or ResearchIndex). iv. The Give-Away corpus is freed from all access/impact barriers on-line. Once a critical mass of researchers has self-archived, the refereed research literature is at last free of all access- and impact-barriers, as it was always destined to be. Excerpted from: Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003) For Whom the Gate Tolls? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/39/ Published as: Harnad, Stevan (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/digital-libraries.htm [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342. http://www.jpgmonline.com/article.asp?issn=0022-3859;year=2003;volume=49;issue=4;spage=337;epage=342;aulast=Harnad] [French version: Harnad, S. (2003) Ciélographie et ciélolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la résoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte à l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou. Pp. 77-103. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/cielographie.pdf http://www.text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=7 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/texte2.pdf] Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: [email protected] Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified 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
