[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
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
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
There have been a number of rather aggressive exchanges on this list recently and some of them have contained the accusation that Stevan or one of the other Green-first proponents are against Gold or against Libre. I would just like to shortly and clearly re-iterate my own position on this which I am certain Stevan at least shares (and which I am fairly certain all of the other Green-first advocates also share): CC-BY licensed journals without reader charges are the clear long-term goal of OA. Those supporting the Green Mandate route simply claim that so far the only route which can be demonstrated by argument to most quickly achieve a significant portion of this (restricted licensed access to the author's final draft directly for ~60% of papers and via an automated request button for the other 40%) is via funder and institutional Immediate Deposit/Optional Access mandates. In replying to arguments putting forth this view, please do not advance the claim that anyone advancing it is anti-Gold or anti-CC-BY. We are not, we are just realists that change is usually incremental, and this is the only incremental step that we can see being possible to persuade academia to take in sufficient numbers to get us moving towards the final goal, and to gain us a significant benefit in the short term. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp 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 GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
Stevan may well be right that the repository of the U of Liege (ORBi) contains 3,620 chemistry papers. But apart from posters, most deposits of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and even theses, are marked restricted access and not accessible to me, and 'libre' access seems completely out of scope. So if this is the best example of a successful OA repository, Peter Murray-Rust can be forgiven for getting the impression that compliance is essentially zero, in terms of Open Access. Jan Velterop On 13 Jul 2012, at 00:11, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: *** The faculty ignore the mandates. This is the reality - Wellcome, who have the sanction of withholding grants and put huge efforts into promoting, still only get 55% compliance. You have spent 10 years trying to get effective mandates and they are hardly working. The compliance in chemistry is 0%. ZERO. Really? You'll have to tell that to your colleagues at, for example, U. Liege: There seem to be 3,620 chemistry papers deposited there: http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151 And that's the optimal ID/OA mandate (Liege model) that I recommended. Wellcome could raise their compliance rate to 100% if they were willing to listen to advice. (Admirably [indeed pioneeringly] early in adopting an OA mandate, they have nevertheless since been deaf to advice for years, insisting on institution-external deposit, allowing publisher deposit, and wasting scarce research money on paying for Gold OA instead of shoring up their Green OA mandate.) Other funders are listening, however, and integrating their mandates with institutional mandates, to make them mutually reinforcing: Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html How to Maximize Compliance With Funder OA Mandates: Potentiate Institutional Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/891-.html There is no way in my or your liftetime that senior chemists will self-archive. And that goes for many other disciplines. What are the VCs going to do? Sack them ? they bring in grant money? No: draw their attention to the financial benefits, as Alma Swan John Houghton have been doing, for Green and Gold OA: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf Yes - and probably 5% of VCs care about it. You are right that the mandate percentage is still far too small (and the effective mandate percentage is still smaller). But the benefits are large, and the costs are next to nothing: just effective policy-making and implementation. My argument - or fairy story - is that nothing will happen if we continue as we are. We have to get much tougher. And university mandates are seen as next to useless - universities can't police them and it alienates the faculty. The attraction of the fairy story is that it's vastly simpler and quicker to carry out. It even builds on the apathy of the faculty - the less they care, the easier it is. I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action. I'm for reality rather than fairy tales. And reaching for the reachable, now, rather than fulminating about the unreachable (especially when reaching for the reachable, now, is eventually likely to bring more of the unreachable within reach). Stevan Harnad ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote: Stevan may well be right that the repository of the U of Liege (ORBi) contains 3,620 chemistry papers. But apart from posters, most deposits of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and even theses, are marked restricted access and not accessible to me, and 'libre' access seems completely out of scope. So if this is the best example of a successful OA repository, Peter Murray-Rust can be forgiven for getting the impression that compliance is essentially zero, in terms of Open Access. I am generalizing from a sample of one in Liege (ORBIS) . This says: *Reference: Ivanova, T. et al - (2012) - Preparation and characterisation of Ag incorporated Al2O3 nanocomposite films obtained by sol-gel method [ handle:2268/127219 http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/127219 ]* *Document(s) requested:* *Tanya-CRT47-579.pdf - Publisher postprint * *The desired document is not currently available on open access. Nevertheless you can request an offprint from the author(s) through the form below. If your request is accepted you will receive by email a link allowing you access to the document for 5 days, 5 download attempts maximum. * *... * *The University expressly draws your attention to the fact that the electronic copy can only be used for the strict purposes of illustration and teaching and academic and scientific research, as long as it is not for the purposes of financial gain, and that the source, including the authorâs name is indicated. * So If I am a small business creating science-based work I am not allowed the Open Access from Liege. If I represent a patient group I am not allowed this material. If I am in government making eveidence-based policy I am not allowed it. It is the pernicious model that only academics need and can have access to the results of scholarship. As I have said before University repositories seem to delight in the process of restricting access. No wonder that no-one will use this repo. All it seems to do is mail the author and I can do that anyway (presumably if the author leaves the uni then the email goes nowhere). In today's market any young reseacher will use #icanhazpdf instead. I am not condoning #icanhazpdf but I am far more sympathetic to it than repos. But I have been told to shut up and I will. I'm slightly disappointed that no-one is prepared to consider the possibility we should do something different. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
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. 2. Libre OA means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles + certain re-use rights (often CC-BY). 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) 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. 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. 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 years or indefinitely. 9. Effective Green OA mandates (ID/OA: Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) are the ones that require immediate deposit of all articles, but if the publisher has an OA embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access during the allowable embargo period (preferably no more than 6 months). 10. During any embargo, the institutional repository has an automated email-eprint-request button that allows users to request a copy for research purposes with one click, and allows the author to comply with one click. (This is not OA but Almost-OA.) 11. The rationale for ID/OA + the Almost-OA button is to ensure that 100% of papers are immediately deposited and accessible for research purposes, not just the 60% that have publisher endorsement. 12. The expectation is that once ID/OA is mandated globally by 100% of institutions and funders, not only will it provide 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA, but it will hasten the end of OA embargoes, as the power and utility of OA become evident, familiar and indispensable to all researchers, as authors and users. There are additional details about optimal mandates. (Deposit should be designated the sole procedure for submitting publications for institutional performance review, and funders should mandate convergent institutional deposit rather than divergent institution-external deposit.) And the further expectation is that once Gratis Green OA is mandated by institutions and funders globally, it will hasten the advent of Libre OA (CC-BY) and Gold OA. All the frustration and complaints being vented in the recent GOAL postings are with the lack of OA. But frustration will not bring OA. Only mandates will. And the optimal mandate is ID/OA, even if it does not confer instant global OA. First things first. Don't let the unreachable best get in the way of the reachable better. Grasp what is already within reach. Stevan Harnad On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 3:48 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.ukwrote: On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote: Stevan may well be right that the repository of the U of Liege (ORBi) contains 3,620 chemistry papers. But apart from posters, most deposits of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and even theses, are marked restricted access and not accessible to me, and 'libre' access seems completely out of scope. So if this is the best example of a successful OA repository, Peter Murray-Rust can be forgiven for getting the impression that compliance is essentially zero, in terms of Open Access. I am generalizing from a sample of one in Liege (ORBIS) . This says: *Reference: Ivanova, T. et al - (2012) - Preparation and characterisation of Ag incorporated Al2O3 nanocomposite films obtained by sol-gel method [ handle:2268/127219 http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/127219 ]* *Document(s) requested:* *Tanya-CRT47-579.pdf - Publisher postprint * *The desired document is not currently available on open access. Nevertheless you can request an offprint from the author(s) through the form below. If your request is accepted you will receive by email a link allowing you access to the document for 5 days, 5 download attempts maximum.* *... * *The University expressly draws your attention to the fact that the electronic copy can only be used for the
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
I think we are going somewhere here. Could we manage, with the help of some foundation, manage to bring together a number of top university administrators from all over the world (minimum 20) to hash out exactly what could be done in a coordinated fashion? Moving en masse to a mandate would create a real momentum that could no longer be ignored. Who wants to work on this? I do! Jean-Claude Le jeudi 12 juillet 2012 à 10:15 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Fairy Tale: * The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days (obviously somewhere nice). * They bring along a few techies (I'd go). * They agree that they will create copies of all the papers their faculty have published. (this is trivial as they are already collecting them for REF, etc. And if they can't , then I can provide software). * They reformat them to non-PDF. * They put them up on their university website. * They prepare to fight the challenge from the publishers. and * they win the law suit. Because it's inconceivable that a judge (except in Texas) will find for the publishers. * Other universities will take the model and do it. Rather than asking universities, unrealistically, to risk a lawsuit, needlessly (even though I agree completely with PM-R that it would be lost), as in PM-R's fairy tail, why not, realistically, do almost the same thing: * The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days * They agree that they will mandate that copies of all the papers their faculty are deposited in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication * They adopt the optimal mandate: ID/OA, together with the email-eprint-request Almost-OA Button for embargoed deposits. * Other universities will take the model and do it. This is called Green Gratis OA self-archiving. No one is proposing to forfeit either Gold OA or Libre OA (re-use rights), just to accord priority to the more important and urgent, and also easier and more reachable goal of mandating Green Gratis OA first, because it is within reach and already underway. The Libre OA and Gold OA will follow the universal mandating of Green Gratis OA as surely as the publishers' lawsuit would lose if PM-R's fairy tale came true. But next to nothing at all will happen if we keep on failing to reach first for the reachable, and keep insisting instead on the unreachable. Stevan Harnad On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: I think JC identifies the key point: On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Gold OA will not get in the way of Green OA if it is explained correctly; and forfeiting gold OA will do more harm to the OA movement than the harm gold OA could ever and putatively make to green OA. If, among OA advocates, we could get this behind us, we could achieve four important results: 1. We would be far more united, and, therefore, more powerful; Yes. But JC does not go far enough. Here's my diagnosis and a fairy-tale * The OA movement is fragmented, with no clear unified objective. We (if I can count myself a member of anything) resemble the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front (Monty Python). Every time I am lectured on why one approach is the only one I lose energy and the movement - if it is a movement - loses credibility. Until we get a unified body that fights for our rights we are ineffective. * Most people (especially librarians) are scared stiff of publishers and their lawyers. * There is a huge pot of public money (tens of billions in sciences) and it's easier to pay off the publishers than standing against them. There is no price control on publishing - publishers charge what they can get away with. * The contract between publishers and academics has
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: *** The faculty ignore the mandates. This is the reality - Wellcome, who have the sanction of withholding grants and put huge efforts into promoting, still only get 55% compliance. You have spent 10 years trying to get effective mandates and they are hardly working. The compliance in chemistry is 0%. ZERO. Really? You'll have to tell that to your colleagues at, for example, U. Liege: There seem to be 3,620 chemistry papers deposited there: http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151 And that's the optimal ID/OA mandate (Liege model) that I recommended. Wellcome could raise their compliance rate to 100% if they were willing to listen to advice. (Admirably [indeed pioneeringly] early in adopting an OA mandate, they have nevertheless since been deaf to advice for years, insisting on institution-external deposit, allowing publisher deposit, and wasting scarce research money on paying for Gold OA instead of shoring up their Green OA mandate.) Other funders are listening, however, and integrating their mandates with institutional mandates, to make them mutually reinforcing: Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html How to Maximize Compliance With Funder OA Mandates: Potentiate Institutional Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/891-.html There is no way in my or your liftetime that senior chemists will self-archive. And that goes for many other disciplines. What are the VCs going to do? Sack them ? they bring in grant money? No: draw their attention to the financial benefits, as Alma Swan John Houghton have been doing, for Green and Gold OA: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf Yes - and probably 5% of VCs care about it. You are right that the mandate percentage is still far too small (and the effective mandate percentage is still smaller). But the benefits are large, and the costs are next to nothing: just effective policy-making and implementation. My argument - or fairy story - is that nothing will happen if we continue as we are. We have to get much tougher. And university mandates are seen as next to useless - universities can't police them and it alienates the faculty. The attraction of the fairy story is that it's vastly simpler and quicker to carry out. It even builds on the apathy of the faculty - the less they care, the easier it is. I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action. I'm for reality rather than fairy tales. And reaching for the reachable, now, rather than fulminating about the unreachable (especially when reaching for the reachable, now, is eventually likely to bring more of the unreachable within reach). Stevan Harnad ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
On 2012-07-12, at 11:13 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action. Comment: I agree and disagree. May I suggest that the OA community should work in tandem with mutual respect rather than attempting to unite? There is no one-size-fits all. Here are some reasons. I would argue that it is the communities of scholars, publishers, and librarians, working both separately and together, that need to take action. Physics has provided us with one model, first with arXiv and now with SCOAP3. Medicine has given us another, with the PubMedCentral International initiative. Economics has RePEC, an interesting initiative that builds on institutional repositories to build a discipline-focused service. Timothy Gowers and colleagues are leading the way in the field of mathematics. In Canada, librarians and publishers have come together in the Synergies project which has helped many scholarly journals to develop an online presence and made open access an easier choice. In Canada and many other countries, academic publishing is not a profitable venture, and so scholarly journals have been subsidized by the government. I think it was Leslie Chan Jean-Claude Guedon who helped the funder, SSHRC, develop an Aid to Open Access Journals program. Latin American countries are somewhat similar in this respect (scholarly publishing is not about the profits); I would argue that this is one of the reasons why this region has been able to go straight for gold. The situation is very different where the for-profit companies are at home and have more ability to lobby effectively, such as the UK and the US. Here, it is probably necessary to start with green. Strong open access policies are important - as Harnad pointed out, these need to be green, involve immediate deposit even if access is delayed, and accomodate the almost-OA researcher-mediated sharing. We should continue to push on these lines. However, I would also argue that ultimately what needs to happen is a careful, thoughtful transition of revenue from toll to open access. The Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity is doing good work in this area and is worthy of support. There are so many open access initiatives today that are worthy of support I can only apologize for the many that I am omitting. One way to think about open access (which a few of us in the Directory of Open Access Books discussion are agreeing on) is that the real opposite of open access is closed access - the works that we cannot read at all, because they are not available or so costly that we cannot afford to read them at all. my two bits, Heather Morrison, MLIS Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/ The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
Let us get back to basics instead of bickering among ourselves. How about trying to organize a high-level meeting of administrators and see what agreement could be achieved to move forward as a group and not through individual moves that keep on differing a little from each other. We need a group definition and implementation of some form of mandate with teeth. Obviously, Bernard Rentier and the rector from Minho could give their viewpoint on this issue in support of such a move. Obviously, Stuart Shieber and others who have managed faculty self-mandating should also be present. Anyone listening? Anyone willing to cooperate on this? Jean-Claude Guédon Le jeudi 12 juillet 2012 à 18:11 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: *** The faculty ignore the mandates. This is the reality - Wellcome, who have the sanction of withholding grants and put huge efforts into promoting, still only get 55% compliance. You have spent 10 years trying to get effective mandates and they are hardly working. The compliance in chemistry is 0%. ZERO. Really? You'll have to tell that to your colleagues at, for example, U. Liege: There seem to be 3,620 chemistry papers deposited there: http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151 And that's the optimal ID/OA mandate (Liege model) that I recommended. Wellcome could raise their compliance rate to 100% if they were willing to listen to advice. (Admirably [indeed pioneeringly] early in adopting an OA mandate, they have nevertheless since been deaf to advice for years, insisting on institution-external deposit, allowing publisher deposit, and wasting scarce research money on paying for Gold OA instead of shoring up their Green OA mandate.) Other funders are listening, however, and integrating their mandates with institutional mandates, to make them mutually reinforcing: Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html How to Maximize Compliance With Funder OA Mandates: Potentiate Institutional Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/891-.html There is no way in my or your liftetime that senior chemists will self-archive. And that goes for many other disciplines. What are the VCs going to do? Sack them ? they bring in grant money? No: draw their attention to the financial benefits, as Alma Swan John Houghton have been doing, for Green and Gold OA: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf Yes - and probably 5% of VCs care about it. You are right that the mandate percentage is still far too small (and the effective mandate percentage is still smaller). But the benefits are large, and the costs are next to nothing: just effective policy-making and implementation. My argument - or fairy story - is that nothing will happen if we continue as we are. We have to get much tougher. And university mandates are seen as next to useless - universities can't police them and it alienates the faculty. The attraction of the fairy story is that it's vastly simpler and quicker to carry out. It even builds on the apathy of the faculty - the less they care, the easier it is. I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action. I'm for reality rather than fairy tales. And reaching for the reachable, now, rather than fulminating about the unreachable (especially when reaching for the reachable, now, is eventually likely to bring more of the unreachable within reach). Stevan Harnad ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal