Open Access @

Peter Suber has pointed out that "About 50% of articles published in peer-reviewed OA journals are published in fee-based journals" (as reported by Laakso & Bjork 2012).

Laakso & Bjork also report that "[12% of] articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers... immediately...".

That's 12% immediate Gold-OA for the (already selective) SCOPUS sample. The percentage is still smaller for the more selective Thomson-Reuters/ISI sample. 

I think it cannot be left out of the reckoning about paid-Gold OA vs. free-Gold OA that: (#1) most articles are not published as Gold OA at all today (neither paid-Gold nor free-Gold)

(#2) the articles of the quality that users need and want most are much less likely to be published as Gold OA (whether paid-Gold or free-Gold) today, and, most important,

(#3) the Gold OA articles of the quality that users need and want most today are less likely to be the free-Gold ones than the paid-Gold ones (even though the junk journals on Jeffrey Beall's "predatory" Gold OA journal list are all paid-Gold).#2 and #3 are hypotheses, but I think they can be tested objectively.

A test for #2 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for Gold OA (including hybrid Gold) articles vs non-Gold subscription journal articles (excluding the ones that have been made Green OA) within the same subject (and language!) area.

A test for #3 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for paid-Gold (including hybrid Gold) vs free-gold articles within the same subject (and language!) area.

I mention this because I think just comparing the number of paid-Gold vs. free-Gold journals without taking quality into account could be misleading.

April 3, 2013.(author unknown)

The New England Journal of Medicine, February 28, 2013.(author unknown)

Nature, March 27, 2013.(author unknown)

Collegiate Times, April 4, 2013(author unknown)

By Raym Crow

Knowledge Exchange* has released “The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources,” the third report in its multiphase “Sustainability of Open Access Resources” initiative. The report, which was funded by SPARC, examines the practical planning issues relevant to the economic sustainability of infrastructure services that support the growth of the open-access dissemination of scholarly and scientific research.

(author unknown)

By Raym Crow

Knowledge Exchange* has released “The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources,” the third report in its multiphase “Sustainability of Open Access Resources” initiative. The report, which was funded by SPARC, examines the practical planning issues relevant to the economic sustainability of infrastructure services that support the growth of the open-access dissemination of scholarly and scientific research.

(author unknown)

What is new this month? Nothing much to report, for once, except that as MyIDEAS usage is expanding, we are now going to alert series and journal maintainers, editors and authors about how many people are following them. But as promised, we will not be revealing who it is. And, of course, we started fantasy leagues.

During the month, we counted 668,431 file downloads and 3,065,876 abstract views. Almost 500 authors registered, proving that there is still a large potential for growth in the RePEc Author Service. And we welcomed the following new archives: Institute of Accounting and Finance Kiev, Grantham Research Institute, Akroasis, Valahia University, Harvard University Press, Kobe University (II), Universidad de Guadalajara, University of Primorska, Ecological University of Bucharest, Duke University (II), Masaryk University, School of Oriental and African Studies, Gdansk University of Technology.

Finally, we reached the follow thresholds:
1000000 cumulative abstract views through Socionet
150000 cumulative downloads through Socionet
15000 listed books
6000 listed online books

Filed under: Workings of RePEc

Institutional agreements with publishers on proxy deposit into institutional repositories are an extremely bad idea, for a number of reasons: 1. The only sure way to achieve 100% open access is to have a rational, systematically verifiable system of deposit and monitoring.

2. Institutions are the providers of all research output, whether published in OA journals or subscription journals.

3. Spontaneous, unmandated OA self-archiving by authors is growing much too slowly.

4. The only way to accelerate OA to 100% is for authors' institiutions and funders to mandate OA self-archiving.

5. Institutions are the only ones in a position to systematically monitor and ensure OA mandate compliance, such that all of their research output is self-archived in their institutional repository.

6. If some deposits are institutional and some are institution-external (central), and some deposits are done by authors and some by publishers, it makes it impossible or extremely complicated to systematically monitor and ensure that all research output is deposited.

7. Self-archiving in the institutional repository immediately upon publication hence has to be made a mandatory part of the standard research work-flow for all institutional researchers (just a few extra keystrokes per paper upon acceptance for publication). (Even librarian proxy deposit is not a good idea.)

8. Instead allowing or encouraging publishers to do the deposit -- either paid OA publishers, or subscription publishers after their self-imposed embargoes have elapsed -- takes the control of OA provision out of the hands of authors and institutions, and leaves it in the hands of publishers. Hence it is a far more effective and far-sighted strategy for institutions to adopt effective, systematic, verifiable institutional OA self-archiving mandates (reinforced by funder mandates) than to be drawn into any side-deals with publishers, whether OA publishers or subscription publishers. (To do so is a Trojan Horse or a Faustian Bargain -- take your pick of metaphors!.)

In response to the Beta SHERPA/FACT "Funders and Authors Compliance Tool," I just want to register my regret and dismay that SHERPA is yet again slavishly amplifying the volume of the ambient noise instead of sensibly filtering out the signal.

For years SHERPA/ROMEO has been parroting publishers' every whim echolalically instead of cataloguing only the essential points of publisher policy for authors: Does the publisher endorse immediate Green OA to the peer-reviewed version? and if not, how long does the publisher propose to embargo it? 

Instead, SHERPA faithfully formalizes every nuance of FUD and double-talk that publishers dream up -- I await a solemn stipulation that the author may only provide OA on Tuesdays, and only if they have a blue-eyed maternal uncle -- leaving users in a wash of useless and arbitrary detail and confusion.

Now this same indiscriminate parroting of ad-hoc improvisations issuing from the RCUK OA policy-makers has been given a megaphone in SHERPA/FACT. 

Instead of leaving RCUK to work out a coherent policy before canonizing it, SHERPA/FACT treats the tentative vagaries of the RCUK policy-makers as if they made sense and were ready to be etched in Mosaic tablets for UK (and worldwide!) researchers to revere and obey.

Instead of agonizing over what journal they may or may not publish in, in order to comply with RCUK requirements, by working their way through the maze of SHERPA/FACT contingencies, RCUK authors would be best to publish in whatever journal they wish to publish in and deposit their refereed final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication (as HEFCE/REF requires). 

Sensible authors should make their deposits OA immediately. Cautious or timid authors can look up the length of their publisher's embargo on OA (if any) and set access to the (immediate) deposit to be made OA when the embargo has elapsed. All authors can be confident that RCUK will (as announced) not be monitoring or "enforcing" Green embargo lengths for years to come, whilst the RCUK policy is being "re-evaluated."

And that's the only information SHERPA/FACT ought to be providing, apart from links to either the publisher's website or RCUK's website, so curious authors can see their respective caprices at first hand. (Green OA is not RCUK's "preferred option," but it is nevertheless reluctantly "allowed".)

As to the rest of the new RCUK policy -- the option that both publishers and RCUK/Wellcome are really interested in, namely, how the Gold subsidy is to be administered and disbursed -- nolo contendere, but the less said, the better: Once you've deposited your final draft in your institutional repository, forget about the Gold subsidy unless your chosen journal happens to be Gold.

Stevan Harnad

European Union requires Open Access: "Money is essential in OA, and only governments are able to provide sufficient funds on a major scale."This conflates author-pays publishing in "Gold" OA journals with cost-free author self-archiving of articles published in subscription journals ("Green" OA).

No extra money is needed for Green OA self-archiving. It just requires a clear mandate (requirement) to self-archive, by depositing the author's final, peer-reviewed draft in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. The deposit should be made OA immediately (or after an embargo period whose allowable length should be as short as possible).

Research Councils UK, under the influence of the publisher lobby, has adopted a mandate that prefers to pay for Gold OA, though it also (reluctantly) allows Green OA. Fortunately, however, HEFCE (Higher Education Founding Council of England) has proposed to mandate immediate deposit of all articles as a precondition for eligibility for evaluation in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), an important source of top-sliced research funding for UK universities.

The EU OA mandate should be for Green OA only, with immediate deposit required (and no embargoes allowed to exceed 6 months). No extra money should be provided for Gold OA. Publication costs today are still being covered in full by worldwide institutional journal subscriptions. So paying for Gold OA today entails double-paying: subscriptions plus Gold OA fees (poached from scarce research funds).

Journal subscriptions cannot be canceled until all journal articles are available by some other means. Globally mandating Green OA will provide that other means. Then subscriptions can be cancelled, releasing the institutional funds to pay for Gold OA without having to double pay -- and also driving down the price of Gold OA (currently vastly inflated) to fair, affordable, sustainable levels, by offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide distributed network of Green OA institutional repositories (phasing out the publisher's print and online edition and their costs):

Post-Green Gold OA will be "Fair Gold." Today's pre-emptive, Pre-Green Gold OA is profligate "Fool's Gold."

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

____ (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

____ (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

____ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

____ (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.

____ (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine 18: 9/10

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold" D-Lib Magazine 19: 1/2

Fantasy (or rotisserie) leagues allow player to manage team members from a real-life competition to compose optimal teams. Fantasy leagues organize their own competitions and are popular in a variety of sports throughout the world. RePEc now has its own fantasy leagues, which allow players to manage economics departments. Specifically, there are two leagues.

Scratch league

Department owners in this league pick faculty members from the pool of authors registered in the RePEc Author Service and create departments from scratch. They need to keep a topical balance and all start with the same budget. Simulated departments are evaluated using the same criteria that underly the ranking of real life institutions.

Extant league

Here, department owners start from an existing department and then trade its faculty to improve it. Simulated departments are evaluated by comparing them to the existing ones they started from. Only economics departments are available for this league.

Markets

Both leagues work with separate markets for economists. Initial prices are based on current ranking scores of the registered economists. All currently registered economists are part of this market, and one can ask to be excluded from this market after log in.

Rules

Rules follow standard fantasy league rules. A few specificities for economists:

• Departments in the scratch league require that economists work in a balanced set of fields. These are based on which topical NEP mailing lists disseminated their working papers.
• One cannot short an economist.
• Newly registered economists are added to the pool with an initial price corresponding to their ranking after the release of new monthly rankings (between the thrid and fifth day of the month.
• Fantasy league rankings are not public.
• A department owner cannot add him/herself to a department. If member of the original department in the extant league, he/she has to immediately trade him/herself.
• One can play at most one department in each league.
• Legues do not follow a seasonal schedule, they are continuously open.
• Rules may be adjusted if the need arises.

Enjoy!

Filed under: RePEc features, Use of RePEc data

Quote/commentary on the replies of Johannes Fournier [JF] to Richard Poynder in
"The Open Access Interviews: Johannes Fournier, speaking for the Global Research Council."JF: "Personally, I see one definite advantage of the Golden Road: it brings with it clear regulations as regards re-use. Contrastingly, self-archiving will often not provide the legal basis that allows for specific forms of re-use like text-and data-mining."This is the classic example of "letting the 'best' become the enemy of the 'better'".

Free-access ("Gratis OA") is within reach (via universal Green OA mandates), free-access-plus-re-use-rights ("Libre OA") is not.

Re-use is use-less without access, and we are nowhere near having free-access to all, most, or much of the journal-article corpus.

Or, to put it another way, the first and foremost "use" is access. So losing more of the precious time (and use) that has already been lost by continuing to over-reach for re-use rights when users don't even grasp the use that is already within reach, is, for want of a better word, a persistent head-shaker in the slow, sad saga of OA.JF: "My views on self-archiving mandates are grounded in the philosophy of the organisation that employs me. The DFG is self-governed by researchers… And researchers don’t like to be forced to do things, they like to be supported and encouraged. For that reason, the DFG encourages open access by funding opportunities that facilitate providing research results in open access."If one thing has been learnt from the slow, sad saga of OA (now at least two decades old) it is that mandating OA works, but encouraging it doesn't.

And neither the DFG nor DFG researchers are any different in this regard. The notion that mandating OA would be an illegal constraint on academic freedom in the DFG remains just as wrong-headed today as it has been since the first day it began to be endlessly parroted -- as wrong-headed as the notion that mandating "publish or perish" (which is, of course, mandated in the DFG, just as it is everywhere else in the research world) would be an illegal constraint on academic freedom in the DFG. JF: "a dichotomy between Green and Gold tends to obscure the question we really need to ask ourselves: what kind of mechanisms could be designed in order to shift money from acquisition budgets into publication funds? Because the transition to open access will only succeed if we find ways to reinvest those funds which are already used to pay for information provision."The goal of Open Access to research is Open Access to research. If we had universal OA to research, the "serials crisis" would instantly become a minor matter rather than the life/death issue it is now (Think about it.)

But, yes, universal, sustainable OA will indeed entail a "shift [of] money from acquisition budgets into publication funds." The missing causal component in this irreproachable reasoning, however, is: "what will drive that shift?".

And that missing causal component (again: think about it) is universal mandatory Green OA self-archiving. (I will not, yet again, spell out the causal contingencies. See here and here.)JF: "the need to buy the subscription content remains. Yet although the transition requires additional money, it might not be necessary to really pay twice: one could operate more economically if the subscription prices for a local library or for a consortium were adjusted to the growth of publication fees. That’s how to avoid so-called double-dipping… I know this sounds very simple and might be rather complex in its implementation, especially because the implementation is likely to require that the funding streams are readjusted."The "implementation" might be rather complex indeed, without mandatory Green OA to drive down costs and force the shift. About as complex as alleviating world hunger, disease or poverty by likewise "readjusting funding streams"...

By Greg Tananbaum

Today, SPARC released a new community resource for research funders entitled, “Implementing an Open Data Policy”.  This primer addresses key issues that these organizations encounter when considering the adoption and implementation of an open data policy.  The guide covers big-picture topics such as how to decide on the range of activities an open data policy should cover.

(author unknown)

By Greg Tananbaum

Today, SPARC released a new community resource for research funders entitled, “Implementing an Open Data Policy”.  This primer addresses key issues that these organizations encounter when considering the adoption and implementation of an open data policy.  The guide covers big-picture topics such as how to decide on the range of activities an open data policy should cover.

(author unknown)

SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN), produced by Peter Suber, makes Current Cites' Top 10 list.(author unknown)

…where I should go…
“Directions” image by flickr user Peat Bakke used by permission.

After a several year postponement while I established and led Harvard’s nascent library skunkworks, the Office for Scholarly Communication, my request for a sabbatical leave has been approved for the 2013–14 academic year. I hope to work on a variety of projects related to library and publishing issues, computational-linguistics–related projects, and teaching preparation.

My plans are to remain in the Boston area during the year but with perhaps several short external residencies at other institutions who might be interested in having me around for a couple of weeks. If your institution might be such a place — willing to provide an office, a place to crash, maybe a plane ticket — please let me know.

[This is a transient post.]

This is the usual story:  Once a free or reasonably priced journal is successful, it is bought, prices are raised, and access restricted. The lure of money is too tempting.

The most recent case concerns the BEPress journals that had pioneered open access in economics (well, actually quasi-open access, but this was acceptable). Aaron Edlin has sold them to DeGruyter, and quasi open access turned into gated access. The author’s rights are disregarded, of course.

We see here that well-defined property rights might bring about economic inefficiency: If a journal can be sold, it will be sold and turned into a goldmine, even if this is inefficient from an economic point of view. This can never happen to RePEc, as it is not owned by anybody. Under the presumption that open access is economically more efficient than gated access, ill defined property rights contribute to efficiency.

As an author make sure that you publish in a journal that cannot be sold, or is unlikely to be sold. Perhaps the existing free journal software should carry a clause that free use is permitted only for open access journals, and other uses are permitted only on paying a stiff fee. This would make credible to the authors that their work remains accessible and would solve the problem even with well-defined property rights, but this is unlikely to happen.

Filed under: Bibliographic features in RePEc, Dissemination of research in Economics, Workings of RePEc

The new Finch/RCUK policy started off on the wrong foot from the very beginning, downgrading cost-free Green OA self-archiving and preferentially funding Gold OA publishing: double-paid Fool's Gold. That was already at the behest of the publishing lobby.

But unfortunately that was aided and abetted by OA advocates in the thrall of Gold Fever and Rights Rapture, needlessly over-reaching for more than just the free online access that is already within reach, and making even that yet again escape our grasp. Yes, the publisher lobby is trying to divide and conquer.

But it will not succeed, because the HEFCE/REF mandate proposal has come to the rescue, dividing deposit and access-setting, requiring that deposit be immediate, in the author's IR, and relegating publishers' embargoes only to access-setting. It is that dividing that will conquer.