Open Access News

Euroscience, which represents 2,300 working scientists in 40 European countries, has launched a new blog dedicated to OA, Opening scientific communication.  It's a group blog and welcomes new contributors.

The inaugural post is by Stevan Harnad, Green OA Self-Archiving Needs a Lobbying Organisation, April 19, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Gold OA and Green OA are clearly complementary, but there is considerable disagreement over which one should be given priority. The current level of OA worldwide is about 20%, of which about 5% is Gold and 15% is Green....

The critical difference in the probability of increasing OA to 100% via Gold or Green is that Gold OA depends on two further factors: Converting journals to Gold and finding the money to pay authors’ Gold OA publication fees....

The situation with Green OA is very different, because it does not depend on converting publishers, and it is virtually cost-free. Most institutions already have Institutional Repositories (IRs). The only problem is that they are largely empty because, as noted, only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously — even though a series of recent studies have demonstrated OA’s dramatic benefits for all fields of scientific and scholarly research (doubled usage and citations)....

Green OA mandates have been repeatedly demonstrated to work....

Moreover, if and when mandated 100% OA from Green self-archiving should ever go on to cause journal subscriptions to be cancelled, thereby forcing journals to convert to Gold OA publishing, the cancellations themselves will release the institutional subscription funds that can then be used to pay for institutional authors’ Gold OA publication charges.

So the pragmatics of the status quo and the goal would seem to indicate that mandating Green OA (by research funders and institutions) should be given priority, rather than focussing on trying to convert journals to Gold OA and trying to find the funds to pay for it. Journal publishing is in the hands of publishers, but Green OA self-archiving is in the hands of authors and their institutions and funders....

So my ardent plea to this discussion group is to give priority to Green OA mandates by universities and funders. An immediate-deposit, immediate-OA mandate is obviously optimal, but if that cannot be agreed upon immediately, an ID/OA [immediate deposit / optional OA] mandate is infinitely preferable to any further delay in adoption....

As far as I can tell, there are only four kinds of “high-level” OA goings-on that are being arranged periodically by various official organisations (librarians, universities, publishers, funders, government committees):

(1) Librarians and universities, who think OA is all about journal affordability, preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI).

(2) “OA Publishers,” who insist that OA is all about conversion to Gold OA and the funding of Gold OA fees (CERN, etc.).

(3) Anti-OA publishers whose interest is in lobbying against Green OA mandates as a threat to their industry.

(4) Copyright reformers who think OA is all about reforming copyright law.

There is no recognized topic of Green OA, no Green OA-specific interest group recognized or invited to any of these high-level meetings.

So only two recourses are left to Green OA advocates: One is to do as we are doing, which is to keep on raising our voices on behalf of Green OA in writings and petitions and at the meetings we are invited to.

The other possibility is the one Richard Poynder and Napoleon Miradon and others have proposed, which is to organise an official Green OA lobby. I think that would be a splendid idea (but it would have to be carefully protected against dilution by well-meaning but blinkered proponents of (1) and (4), and perhaps even (3), which would defeat both its focus and its purpose)....

Let us work to make it sooner, rather than later.