Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) did not "sell out" to Elsevier in agreeing to pay for Open Access publication charges in exchange for compliance with their (very welcome and timely) Open Access mandate. They (and the Wellcome Trust) simply made a strategic mistake -- but a mistake that no one at HHMI (or Wellcome) as yet seems ready to re-think and remedy:
What HHMI should have done was to mandate that all HHMI fundees must deposit the final, accepted, peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints") of all their published articles in their own institution's Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Instead, they uncritically followed the (somewhat incoherent) "e-biomed" model, and mandated that it must be deposited directly in PubMed Central, a central, 3rd-party repository, within 6 months of publication.
The reason this was a mistake (and the reason it is silly to keep harping on HHMI's "selling out") is that all Elsevier journals, including Cell Press, are already "Green" on immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR: It is only 3rd-party archiving that they object to (as rival publication).
But there is no reason whatsoever to hold out (or pay) for direct deposit in a central repository: All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable....
So in exchange for their unnecessary and arbitrary insistence on having the full-text deposited directly in PubMed Central within six months of publication, HHMI (and Wellcome, and other followers of this flawed model) have agreed instead to pay arbitrary, inflated, and unnecessary "Gold" OA publication charges. That would in itself be fine, and simply a waste of money, if it did not set an extremely bad example for other research funders and institutions, who are also looking to mandate OA self-archiving, but do not have the spare change to pay for such extravagant and gratuitous expenses....
Elsevier already gives blanket permission for self-archiving in institutional repositories and could easily have added PubMed Central to the list of eligible destinations. For this purpose, the distinction between institutional repositories (IRs) and PubMed Central (PMC) is arbitrary. In openness, interoperability, and visibility to search engines, they are equivalent. If a PMC deposit hurts Elsevier, so does an IR deposit. If an IR deposit is harmless for Elsevier, so is a PMC deposit. Elsevier could have adapted to HHMI without incurring any new costs or risks. Instead, HHMI paid it to adapt....
[I]t seems that HHMI could just as easily have required its grantees to deposit their postprints in their own IRs, rather than PMC. The snag there, unfortunately, is that not all HHMI grantees work at institutions with IRs. Hence, HHMI had good reason to call Elsevier's bluff....
[The Wellcome Trust] and Elsevier struck a deal last September for the same reasons that HHMI and Elsevier struck one now. WT agreed to pay Elsevier higher fees than HHMI is paying ($3,000 per Elsevier article and $5,000 per Cell Press article), but it got more for its money. WT got immediate OA, while HHMI is getting embargoed OA. WT got OA to the published edition, while HHMI is getting OA to an unedited edition. WT got a Creative Commons license or equivalent; while HHMI could use CC licenses on deposited, unedited manuscripts, the published editions will remain under Elsevier's copyright with no significant reuse rights....
I have to conclude that HHMI was ripped off. Or if that's too negative, Elsevier got a fantastic deal....
HHMI is paying a fee for green OA....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/20/2007 11:25:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
