RE: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Armbruster, Chris wrote:

> Intervention on cost of open access:
>
> arXiv, SSRN and RePEc estimate their 'first copy costs' at 
> $1-5... They do not organise peer review, editing and 
> copy-editing.
Repositories provide access to papers, before and after 
peer-reviewed publishing. Comparing access provision to 
peer-reviewed publishing is comparing apples and oranges (or 
Karaoke to Caruso...)

> Surely several hundred dollars per article will on average be 
> enough to provide sophisticated certification and editing 
> services currently not available from repositories.
Yes. But that service-provider is called a peer-reviewed journal.

> it would be possible to save libraries millions of dollars if 
> open access publishing reform were done right.
The right way to do it is to mandate Green OA. Then 
cancellations, downsizing, and conversion to Gold OA may 
eventually follow. But the urgent part is the OA, for research 
and researchers, not the dollar-saving, for libraries.

> Many proponents of the green and the gold road have lost sight 
> of what open access was meant to strategically accomplish: 
> enhance access, inclusion and impact.
Green OA certainly has not lost sight of that: It's what brought 
it into focus in the first place; and it's the only thing Green 
OA is for.

> - Green OA by means of institutional repositories (expensive 
> digital doubling of research articles that aren't even 
> originals but only 'dirty' copies)
Nonsense. The digital "doubling" is neither expensive (costs a 
few keystrokes) nor "dirty" (the author's final, revised, 
accepted, peer-reviewed draft is every bit as useful to 
researchers who cannot afford access to the publisher's PDF as 
the PDF itself).

> Mandates may be legitimate as collective action if they secure 
> the further progress of science (and this includes establishing 
> a more efficient publishing system).
Green OA mandates may or may not transform the publishing system, 
but they will certainly provide OA, which is all that research 
and researchers need.

> Mandates may also be in the best interest of the author 
> (consider as analogy mandatory car/driver insurance).
They certainly are. (And Alma Swan's analogy to mandated 
seat-belts is even better, because it does not refer to payments, 
but just to buckling up -- which is very much like the keystrokes 
that are the only thing standing between us and 100% OA.)

> research funding councils, universities and research libraries 
> have an understandable and justified collective interest in 
> altering the standard copyright contract to ensure that the 
> research literature becomes available more cheaply and with 
> extensive use and re-use permissions (e.g. for text and data 
> mining).
Mandating copyright policy is a much taller order than mandating 
the immediate deposit of all postprints. Do the latter first, 
then try to get agreement to adopt a copyright mandate if you 
like...

Stevan Harnad