The "Green" and "Gold" roads to open access: The case for mixing and matching

Serials Review

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 315-328

  Guédon, Jean Claude ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 10944261540     PISSN: 00987913     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.005     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. The Open Access movement has been characterized by a common objective—namely Open Access to peer-reviewed, scholarly articles—and a dual strategy to attain this objective. See the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) published on the Web on February 14, 2002, http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml . To qualify as Open Access, a document must follow two different sets of conditions that were clearly outlined in the Bethesda declaration, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm#note1 . (1) The user is granted a number of rights (e.g., “a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works”); (2) the document must be archived “in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access”; these are the exact words of the Bethesda Statement on Open Access. They refine and elaborate upon the definition that emerged with BOAI. The Public Library of Science endorses the Bethesda definition of Open Access (see http://www.plos.org/about/openaccess.html )
2. This “reader pays” phraseology is as inaccurate as the “author pays” expression. Later in this text, we shall speak about a “subsidized author.”
3. This is, at best, shorthand for journals deriving their income at the point of production and not at the point of sale. Effectively, the point of sale disappears with Open Access. Someone, perhaps a granting agency, a foundation, a research institution, or even in some rare cases, an author, pays the publishing fee set up by the publisher. A better expression would be “paid on behalf of the author,” which is accurate but a little unwieldy. Perhaps a “subsidized author” would foot the bill and provide a nice parallel for the “subsidized reader” expression used later on.
4. In India, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, etc. See notes 47–52.
5. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt , slide 47. Specifically, Harnad writes: “Open access through author/institution self-archiving is a parallel self-help measure for researchers, to prevent further impact-loss now. Open access is a supplement to toll-access, but not necessarily a substitute for it.” Note the reference to “impact-loss.” This is really a “manque-à-gagner” (loss of possible gains) rather than a direct loss. What Harnad means to say is not that impact already gained is going to be lost; it is that impact that might be added to already gained impact is not being added. What he really meant to write is that self-archiving is a self-help measure to open up the possibility of further impact gains.
6. See http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ . The SHERPA version of RoMEO, which is to be preferred as it is current, can be found at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php . SHERPA is funded by JISC and CURL. It is hosted by the University of Nottingham. The “green” and “gold” terminology itself seems to have been invented by Stevan Harnad while discussing the results stemming from the RoMEO study.
7. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmsctech.htm
8. A summary of the House Committee recommendations (July 15, 2004) can be found at the following URL: http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=o31 . For the publishers' reactions, see their open letter to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, dated August 28, 2004, available at http://www.pspcentral.org/ . It is important to read the full letter rather than the excerpts published by Ann Okerson on Liblicense-l on August 30th ( http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0408/msg00137.html )
9. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Hypermail?Amsci/3875.html .
10. The tradition of exchanging offprints among scholars and researchers is a clear example of a situation where affordability and access are sharply kept distinct.
11. This is an allusive reference to a very recent discussion (August 6, 2004), http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&O=D&F=l&P=68397
12. For an interesting discussion on the number of refereed journals and articles, see http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2983.html . The figures quoted in this discussion range from 15,000 titles (Eugene Garfield) to 24,000 titles (Stevan Harnad) with a corresponding spread in the number of articles published annually: from 1.5 to 2.5 million—the ratio of 100 articles/journal/year is commonly used in the scientific, technical, and medical disciplines (STM). The figure of 85% dates back to the early part of August 2004. On August 25th, Stevan Harnad advanced the 92% figure along with the conversion of the Royal Society of Chemistry ( http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3938.html )
13. It must be noted that until publishers gave their various forms of green light to self-archiving, its very possibility was very problematic at best. From the standpoint of intellectual property laws, no one has tested Harnad's tactic of archiving two files (submitted file plus corrigenda)—a point which would worry any university manager in charge of an institutional repository. This approach has to be tested in at least two ways: with regard to the notion of derivative work, and also plagiarism. It may sound strange to say that an author could be accused of plagiarizing himself or herself, but copyright law, let us remember, deals with property, intellectual property in this case, and signing away copy rights is signing intellectual property away. Copyright laws emerged in part to prevent an author from selling a manuscript to several publishers. Without the publishers' agreement, self-archiving is also problematic from a practical standpoint. I shall return to this point later.
14. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html .
15. See, for example, Stevan Harnad's reaction to an article in an Indian publication at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3156.html (accessed November 8, 2003).
16. See, for example, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3161.html (accessed November 12, 2003) where Stevan Harnad writes: “I'm afraid that all this eminently accessible open access will continue to be needlessly delayed as long as our attention and enthusiasm continue to be directed solely or primarily at the slower road. We should really be promoting both roads, and each in proportion to its immediate capacity to deliver Open Access. What is happening now is instead rather like trying to increase the population by promoting in vitro fertilization alone, neglecting the faster, surer path…” Note, in passing, the rhetoric: gold is to green as in vitro fertilization is to natural fertilization! The metaphor is funny because it caricatures the situation. But it is only a caricature, not an analysis.
17. See http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3162.html . Harnad estimates that 10% of all articles are in Open Access. Of these, one fourth or 2.5% of all articles published appear in gold publications while about three fourths or 7.5% of all articles published appear in green titles. While 85% of all articles could potentially be placed in Open Access, about a tenth of that quantity actually is.
18. Harnad, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt , slides 42–43.
19. Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge, Les Carr, and Stevan Harnad, “The Impact of OAI-based Search on Access to Research Journal Papers” (September 2003), http://opcit.eprints.org/serials-short/serials11.html .
20. Some authors have defined impact differently. For example, Sidney Redner suggests to multiply the total number of citations by their average age. This suggests that measuring impact is not as simple and transparent as a simple citation count suggests, but I shall not address this question here and will act as if citation counts suffice. See S. Redner, “Citation Statistics from more than a Century of Physical Review” (July 27, 2004), http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0407137 .
21. Steve Lawrence, “Online or Invisible?” http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/ . Edited version appears in Nature 411, no.6837 (2001): 521.
22. See, for example, Stevan Harnad, Tim Brody, Francois Vallières, Les Carr, Steve Hitchcock, Yves Gingras, Charles Oppenheim, Heinrich Stamerjoanns, and E.R. Hilf, “The Green and the Gold Roads to Open Access,” Nature (Web focus) (2004), http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html . See also Michael J. Kurtz, “Restrictive Access Policies Cut Readership of Electronic Research Journal Articles by a Factor of Two” (2004), http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19oa/kurtz.pdf , and Andrew M. Odlyzko, “The Rapid Evolution of Scholarly Communication.” Learned Publishing 15 (January 2002): 7–19, http://www.catchword.com/alpsp/09531513/v15n1/contp1-1.htm .
23. See note 9 above.
24. Educom Review Staff, “Networked Information: Finding What's Out There—Clifford A. Lynch Interview,” Educom Review 32–36 (1997), http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/review/reviewarticles/32642.html .
25. Incidentally, why has no librarian, so far as I know, ever tried to implement a similar system on any campus? I have not systematically investigated this question and I would be delighted to stand corrected.
26. Kenneth Frazier “The Librarians' Dilemma. Contemplating the costs of the ‘Big Deal’” D-Lib Magazine 7 3 March 2001 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html .
27. http://www.crossref.org/ , http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/sfx.htm . Elsevier's Scopus proceeds from the same argument. It also introduces fascinating implications about who will eventually control the search engines of science: Google, ISI's Web of Science, or Elsevier's Scopus?
28. This is the case with the “Digital Object Identifier” (DOI). As stated in the DOI Handbook, “specifically, DOI relies on copyright and trademark law to protect the DOI brand and reputation. DOI is not a patented system; the IDF has not developed any patent claims on the DOI system and does not rely on patent law for remedy,” http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/governance.html#7.2 .
29. See http://paracite.eprints.org/ , http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs .
30. Carl Lagoze (Cornell University) and Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratories) are two of the leaders of the OAI-PMH protocol.
31. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/view.cfm .
32. At the hearings of the UK Commons Select Committee, the Royal Society of Chemistry advanced this kind of argument in the following terms: “Currently most authors care where their work is seen and who it is seen by far more than they care about how many people have seen it,” “Scientific Publications Free for All,” the Science and Technology Committee of the UK House of Commons, vol. II, Oral and Written Evidence, p. EV-209 (p. 217, section 4.5 within a PDF reader). This statement is quoted in the main report (p. 9, item 8) and commented as follows: “This dispute goes to the core of the question of who should pay for the costs of scientific publications: those who argue in favor of the widest possible dissemination tend to be more receptive to the author-pays model of publishing; those who prefer targeting publications at a small, selected audience tend to be more content to maintain the status quo.” Odlyzko, on the other hand, suggests that Open Access brings the literature to new categories of readers (and appears to enjoy it): “Much of the online usage appears to come from new readers (…) and often from places that do not have access to print journals.” Odlyzko, “The Rapid Evolution,” 8. As Odlyzko puts it, “… scholars … are engaged in a ‘war for the eyeballs’.” Ibid., p. 9.
33. We are talking about impact factors here, as we are dealing with “gold” journals. For good or bad reasons—probably bad ones in fact—most scientists are more familiar with impact factors than with impact (and their tenure and promotion committees also).
34. ADS = Astrophysics Data System. The part in brackets that clarifies Michael Kurtz' statement presumably comes from Stevan Harnad as moderator of the American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum, http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&O=A&F=l&P=44671 .
35. Ibid.
36. On this concept, see Michael H. Goldhaber, “The Attention Economy and the Net,” First Monday , http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ (accessed April 1997).
37. Odlyzko, “The Rapid Evolution.”
38. The original article is Samuel C. Bradford, “Sources of Information on Specific Subjects,” Engineering 137 (January 26, 1934): 85–86. The law of concentration appears in Eugene Garfield, “The mystery of the transposed journal lists—wherein Bradford's law of scattering is generalized according to Garfield's law of concentration,” Essays of an Information Scientist (Philadelphia, ISI Press, 1977): 222–223. The original article appeared in August 1971. Conversely, Garfield's law of concentration could be (ironically?) read as a way to justify a more pragmatic and relaxed attitude to the documentation search problem.
39. See for example the recent remarks by Heather Morrison, http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&O=D&F=l&P=69057 . For a related argument, see Eugenio Pelizarri, “Harvesting for Disseminating. Open Archives and Role of Academic Libraries” to be published in January 2005 in the Acquisitions Librarian. Available online at http://www.bci.unibs.it/doc/Pelizzari-REVIEWED-harvesting%20for%20disseminating%20FINAL.doc .
40. It works rather well, but it is not perfect, far from it. David Goodman, whom I thank, has attracted my attention on a study done by Péter Jacsó (“Péter's Picks and Pans CiteBaseSearch, Institute of Physics Archive, and Google's Index to Scholarly Archive,” Online 28, no.5 (September 5, 2004): 57–58, showing that Google did not perform all that well on deep searches within Open Access databases. A summary of the results is found on Peter Suber's precious Weblog on Open Access: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_08_29_fosblogarchive.html#a109406153195893347 .
41. http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ .
42. See the description of the article base at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/description.html . In a recent intervention, Stevan Harnad writes, “But Pubmed and PMC are not only better because of their better search features (which can all, of course, be fully duplicated by OAIster and by any other OAI search engine, whenever we wish to implement them!):…” http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&D=0&F=l&O=D&P=68930 . However, if this search engine is so simple to duplicate, why is it not already done?
43. Stevan Harnad, www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt , slide 45: “Don't conflate the different forms of institutional archiving.”
44. It is important to recall that the varieties of green involve a shade of pale green limiting “self-archiving” to preprints. In Stevan Harnad's powerpoint presentation ( www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt , slide 41), the pale green publishers account for 30% of all publications but they are not treated separately, presumably on the basis that the preprint plus corrigenda strategy is realistic. Personally, I have always questioned the viability (and even legality) of the “self-archiving” strategy to the point that I had given very little credence to “self-archiving” before “real” green publishers began to be identified in the RoMEO project.
45. This remark applies particularly well to scientists in poor or in “transition” countries.
46. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~Harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt , slide 47.
47. See http://www.scielo.org/index.php?lang=en .
48. See, for example, http://www.jpgmonline.com/ . The Indian Academy of Science has also placed its journals in Open Access. See Subbiah Arunachalam, “India's march towards open access,” SciDev.net (March 5, 2004), http://www.scidev.net/Opinions/index.cfm?fuseaction=readOpinions&itemid=243&language=1 .
49. Some ideas about China's evolution with regard to Open Access can be found in Liu Chuang, “Recent Development in Environmental Data Access Policies in the Peoples' Republic of China,” http://books.nap.edu/books/0309091454/html/74.html#pagetop
50. For France, the best sites to find information on Open Access are Hélène Bosc's site ( http://www.tours.inra.fr/prc/internet/documentation/communication_scientifique/comsci.htm#auto ) and the INIST site ( http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/ )
51. See, for example, Susanna Mornati, “Progetto AEPIC: gli archivi aperti italiani su une piattaforma nazionale,” http://e-prints.unifi.it/archive/00000461/01/1_multipart_xF8FF_2_Relazione_Mornati.pdf. and Valentina Comba, AEPIC Academic E-Publishing Infrastructures-CILEA: Progetto di editoria elettronica per la ricerca e la didattica (2002), http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00000066/01/AEPIC-CO511.pdf .
52. Spain appears a little behind in the Open Access movement. However, the efforts of Cristóbal Pasadas Ureña (University of Granada) must be noted (he pushes for Open Access within IFLA, for example). Likewise, Catalonia appears to be moving ahead, at least with theses and dissertations ( http://www.tdx.cesca.es/index_tdx_an.html )
53. On both fronts, the Information Program of the Open Society Institute has been extremely active and useful.
54. http://www.lib.utk.edu/mt/weblogs/scholcomm/archives/000300.html . The new Springer is the result of the merging of the old Springer plus Kluwer. The CEO for this new publishing behemoth is Derk Haank, formerly Reed-Elsevier's CEO. A better understanding of what is happening at the new Springer can be derived from the fascinating interview of Derk Haank, “Put up or Shut up,” recently published by Richard Poynder ( http://www.infotoday.com/it/sep04/poynder.shtml )
55. Springer places a US$3,000 fee on its articles, i.e., twice as much as PloS. This is how Derk Haank explains this decision in his interview with Richard Poynder: “As always, I am very serious—$3000 is a very competitive price. Even Open-Access advocates would have to acknowledge that. The Wellcome Trust report, for instance, estimated the true cost of publishing a paper at more like $3500.”
56. On DSpace, see McKenzie Smith, “An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository,” http://www.mybestdocs.com/smith-m-etal-dspace.htm . It was originally published in D-Lib Magazine 9, no.1 (2003).
57. See Odlyzko, “The Rapid Evolution,” p. 9.
58. This is the argument that David Kohl, for example, regularly gives in his talks. See, for example, “Better value from bigger deals: issues and experience” available from http://www.subscription-agents.org/conference/200302/ as a PowerPoint presentation.
59. The expression “overlay journal” may not satisfy all and other terms have been suggested, such as “Article Database” or “deconstructed journal.” Debates and usage will eventually stabilize these terms. On the notion of “deconstructed journal, see John W. T. Smith, “The Deconstructed Journal—A New Model for Academic Publishing,” Learned Publishing 12, no.2 (April 1999), http://library.kent.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/d-journal.htm .
60. A very recent (September 3, 2004) statement released by NIH completely supports this view. See: “Notice: Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information,” http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html . Thanks to the guest editor for this issue of Serials Review for having attracted my attention to this document.