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.
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.
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.
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.
2. Libre OA means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles +
certain re-use rights (often CC-BY).
'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'.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
