The Parachute

Open Access and WikiProfessional

2008-06-09T14:57:00.002+01:00

One of the first WikiProfessional instances is WikiProteins. An article in Genome Biology describes it in great detail. The lead author of that article, Barend Mons, reacts to the post by Euan Adie on Nature’s Nascent blog (“WikiProteins is a croc”, later changed to “WikiProteins – a more critical look”). Because it is important to understand the open access nature of the WikiProfessional project, I am reproducing Barend's reaction to the blog entry in its entirety here.

Jan Velterop

Although the rather sour blog by Euan is quite an exception in the overall positive reactions we receive on the beta site of WikiProteins, I feel that a matter-of-fact reaction from the lead author of the article in Genome Biology that announced it is warranted. It goes hereby.

First of all on Authorship: Jimmy [Wales] was instrumental in making the initial contacts between me and Gerard Meijssen who was then working on WiktionaryZ, now Omegawiki. He also gave invaluable advice on several aspects of the system and he therefore deserves as much of an authorship acknowledgement as the average senior author/professor who ‘conceived of the study’. See also Gerard Meijssens’ Blog about that.

On the interface etc., we all know this is beta and we struggled for a long time to make it as ‘good’ as it is. Obviously a flat file is easier than managing a relational database and therefore the interface can never be ‘really easy’. I agree with Peter Jan [one of the commentators on the Nascent blog entry] that constructive criticism would have been more useful.

Criticism on the commercial nature (as it were) of a company on a blog made available by another commercial company – one that makes money on others’ scientific contributions for as long as we have been studying nature – is a bit peculiar as well. With the involvement of Amos Bairoch, Michael Ashburner , Mark Musen, Abel Packer, Roberto Pacheco, Matt Cockerill and many others in this process, not to mention Jan Velterop’s reputation, it seems to me that the OA nature of the projects is sufficiently safeguarded. With my personal background in malaria, working for 15 years with colleagues in developing countries, I also built a public track record in pushing free access to information for developing countries.

The content in WikiProfessional applications is completely freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (we are working on making author credits more clearly visible). The Knowlets are indeed proprietary as we create added value and apply algorithms that by themselves now have taken several million dollars to develop. It has proven exceedingly difficult to get sufficient public funding for this project, which has been carefully internationally discussed and prepared for several years. Bill Melton and Al Berkeley are to be highly commended for taking the risk to fund the vision.

Also the Knowlet space is in Open Access for non-commercial use. I sincerely hope that seasoned investors like Bill and Al would be more imaginative than trying to monetize this site – and the others still to come – by ads only.

On potential fear of competition: let me tell everyone up-front that the authors on the paper have every intention to connect all information on important concepts via WikiProfessional, not trying to put it behind any barrier or to compete with anyone. Some may see us as a competitor to IHOP or Wikipedia pages on biomedical concepts for instance, which is not true, as you will soon see.

We are planning to add locally maintained databases on genes such as www.dmd.nl to the appropriate concept page in WikiProteins much more prominently placed than today (now an indirect link via SwissProt data), but also locally-maintained databases on single gene mutations such as the growing number of Leiden Open Variation Databases (LOVD’s). We have a project starting to map all concepts in WikiProfessional, including all biomedical concept pages, to the corresponding pages in Wikipedia and other emerging wiki’s. People who find the WikiProfessional interface too difficult will be soon able to contribute to their own wiki of choice and their contributions will be seen in WikiProfessional anyway.

We collectively ‘own’ the basic data and anyone is free to ‘add value’ to these and make that ‘added value’ freely available to all or just for public not-for-profit use. Knewco is just one of the companies that derives value from the data and has decided to make the added value available to the scientific community for free.
I cannot wait until Nature will be Open Access as well, at least as far as the scientific articles are concerned. Then it will be easier to make full use of Nature content for the benefit of the scientific community.

One more point on equity and access: the collaboration with our Brazilian colleagues, with whom I co-developed and signed the Salvador Declaration on Open Access, referred to in the supplementary data of the Genome Biology paper, will soon result in crossing the language barrier to Spanish and Portuguese. The record for my beloved ‘malaria’ in Omegawiki will show you our ambition on in how many languages we would like to support the indexing on-the-fly. For Free.

I hope these further explanations take away at least the worst of Euans fears. I see in today’s version of the blog that he did not only change the original title of the contribution, but I also saw a more balanced reaction to Peter-Jan Roes.

However, Euan, if you still feel that some of your comments were justified and not yet properly addressed, please substantiate your claims and in the process it is highly appreciated if you give some constructive criticism. You would really help the community – and us – by doing that. Let’s keep discussing this project to make it better.

The meanings of 'free'

2008-05-30T15:30:00.005+01:00

I've received questions about Knewco's WikiProfessional. How free it is; and if it is free as in 'free beer' or free as in 'free speech'.

Life's never simple: it's a combination of both.

WikiProfessional's million minds approach does rely on user input. That's nothing new in science – in fact, the whole scientific knowledge edifice relies on user input. The user-generated content in WikiProfessonal is indeed free as in 'free speech'. The relationship-concept matrix (the knowlet-database, dynamic, relational, and constantly recalculated, reacting to any infusion of new knowledge) is also free to users, but free as in 'free beer'. It took considerable effort to develop and build it – and to maintain it – so it actually is (will be) paid for, by advertising and sponsorships we hope. The users 'pay' as in 'paying' a visit, and 'paying' attention, which we can then use to attract appropriate advertisers. (For some reason we haven't quite figured out yet how to survive on plain air, and we need to generate income to sustain our activities.)

It is important to distinguish the knowlet part and the wiki part in the WikiProfessional database. Knewco (the Knowledge Navigation and Expert Wiki Company) owns the first one and the knowlet is patented. In due time, there will be feeds available from the knowlet database to whoever wants to (or pays for, this might typically be a premium service).

The wiki part of the database on the other hand contains publicly as well as privately available authority and community contributions. We don't 'have' those; we just use those, as anyone else can do, at least with regard to the public ones (one has to approach the 'owners', authorities – NLM, Swissprot/Uniprot, etc. – for these authoritative databases). With respect to the community annotations and contributions, those are freely available under a CC-BY licence (Creative Commons Attribution Licence), and eventually we may have this available in a suitable form for downloading. There may be a potentially fruitful collaboration with Open Progress with regard to standardizing the download/exchange format.

Meanwhile, go to WikiProfessional, use the system, give us feedback, register and contribute, and work with us on spreading scientific knowledge via collaborative intelligence.

Jan Velterop

A rose by any other name

2008-05-28T20:15:00.005+01:00

"Doctors often exude an air of omniscience, but in truth they are surprisingly ignorant."

Thus began an article in this week’s Economist. Harsh language, but many a doctor, or other professional, including scientists, will recognize himself or herself in these words. The article in The Economist isn’t specifically about that, but the sense of information overload is surely a major contributory factor to this 'surprising ignorance'. After all, a lot of the information one gets to digest is ambiguous, redundant, fragmented, inconsistent, to name a few problems. As Herbert Simon, an American political scientist once observed: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes attention. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The problem of the information glut in a nutshell.

Today saw the launch of an attempt to combat this abundance, redundancy, fragmentation and inconsistency: WikiProfessional.

The idea is that the combined efforts of a ‘million minds’ would be able, in a collaborative intelligence exercise, to refine a system that 'distills' the essence of established knowledge as well as points to new knowledge that has a high likelihood of being established soon. What it all entails is explained in an open access article in Genome Biology.

The concept (so to speak) is so far optimized for the life sciences and medicine, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t work in other areas as well. And in languages other than English. It is based on concepts, and those are of course valid in any language. It’s just the words or descriptions used for them are different. As Shakespeare already noted in Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Just imagine what that means. One of the beauties of the concept approach (as opposed to the keyword approach) is that search terms in one language could, for instance, yield search results in another. Think of Chinese researchers searching with Chinese terms for English literature (they can read English, but may find it more difficult to come up with search terms in English, in the same way that I find it sometimes easier to search with Dutch terms), yet getting served up with English search results. Things like that. Wonderful.

(I have to declare an interest: I’m running Knewco, the company behind WikiProfessional).

Jan Velterop

Wiki temperatures

2008-05-25T10:57:00.008+01:00

In the Chronicle of Higher Education Jeffrey Young reports about a 'frozen' Wikipedia being more academically useful for students than the current version, which can be – and is – edited all the time, sometimes resulting in a lot of heat. There is something tremendously attractive in having unfettered editing possibilities, but also in having stable, authoritative articles in such an extremely useful web resource as the Wikipedia. In an academic environment, one would ideally have both. WikiProfessional, which is specifically conceived for the academic and professional environment, actually gives both. On the one hand it presents stable, vetted and authoritative knowledge, yet on the other hand it gives the utterly useful and necessary option for knowledge to be supplemented and annotated in real time by anyone wishing to do so. Both the authoritative version, and community annotations and additions, are presented side-by-side. Only when annotations and additions are deemed acceptable by the professional or academic community in question – peer-reviewed in one way or another – are they elevated to the level of 'received knowledge'.

For open access WikiProfessional presents a nice additional opportunity: 'annotations' can be links to particularly appropriate and relevant articles. And if such links were made to freely available versions of the articles in question, this would give WikiProfessional some of the functionality of a federated repository, not just enhancing an article's exposure and findability, but at the same time putting it in the right context in the Concept Web. This, in turn, may well further increase the chances of such an article to be cited.

Jan Velterop

Dealing with abundance – getting more out of the science literature than you thought possible

2008-05-15T13:31:00.003+01:00

Open access is adding to the abundance of scientific information available to us. It is to be expected that this abundance will be growing fast, with the growth of open access. This is good, because only comprehensive and unfettered access to the science literature will make it possible for us to be truly abreast of the scientific progress that's being made.

On the other hand, however, it will present us with even more challenges than we already face in terms of being able to deal with all that information. In certain disciplines reading all the relevant papers to our research topic means digesting thousands of papers per year – enough to fill our entire working time. Without assistance from the processing capabilities and speed of computers, we cannot hope to keep up with emerging trends in our chosen fields.

Few scientists can properly cope with mushrooming information and were they to read all the articles relevant to them, they would find that they almost always contain a very large amount of information already known to them. That redundant information is usually provided for the sole purpose of context and readability. The amount of actual new information is often surprisingly small and could have been conveyed in one or two sentences if the context were clear. Yet the essence of the scientific discourse is captured in those few sentences. The surrounding text of articles is, if you wish, the packaging in which the essence is transported, and analogous to the mass of fluffy stuff that's surrounding breakable item that's being shipped: emballage.

At Knewco, the company that I now work for, we aim to provide an environment for concentrating this scientific discourse – 'distilling' it from the abundance of sources, if you wish – and make it more productive by making it computer-processable. Very few scientists can read and digest all the articles and database entries that they would need to read and digest in order to synthesize the essence of the knowledge they need. So what we do is to enable and foster collaborative intelligence between machine processing power and human brainpower. Knewco 'distills' information to the essence of knowledge content from millions of documents, enriching it in the process with linked concepts and context.

This is not the same as making it possible to locate the one right document out of the abundance available. It is identifying 'atoms' of knowledge about a given concept from the literature and combining these atoms into 'molecules' of knowledge (we call those "knowlets" – a knowlet connects facts). Just as a graph can give you in one glance the essence of an enormous array of numbers in one glance, the knowlet gives you the essence of an enormous amount of scientific literature. It's like reading out of a picture instead of text. And as "a picture is worth more than a thousand words", a knowlet could be said to be worth more than the text of a thousand articles. Knowledge redesigned, as it were.

Perhaps more importantly, since a knowlet is a computer artifact, it can be used to identify related information, predict trends and intersections in data (see it as a kind of topology of knowledge), be used in combination with other knowlets of more complex concepts, and be updated in real time to keep information current up to the minute.

For technology of this kind to be optimally effective for scientific knowledge discovery, access to the literature is not sufficient by itself. It goes without saying that the source documents must be computer-readable to be optimally usable. Publishers as well as repositories may wish to take this to heart if they are serious about helping to speed up the pace of scientific progress.

Jan Velterop

Onwards from open access

2008-03-14T11:14:00.002Z

As many of my readers will already know, I have recently decided to leave my position of Director of Open Access at Springer for that of CEO of Knewco Inc. Several reactions that I have since received indicate to me that my move is not necessarily understood by everyone, and I’ve even seen speculations that my leaving open access might mean that it is not going anywhere at Springer.

Let me say the following to that. First of all, OA has developed some very solid roots within Springer and I am most confident that OA is being further developed with alacrity by my successors at Springer.

Secondly, I don’t feel that I am leaving open access. Open access is not some club that one is a member of or not; it is a 'thought form' that one adheres to. And open access is only one of the ways in which the speed, efficiency and quality of scientific discovery can be enhanced.

Looking back on my career, I feel that my motives haven’t changed much. When I was working on IDEAL/APPEAL* (at Academic Press) in 1994-95 and later, I did this on the premise that there must be better ways to disseminate the research papers published in journals than just via relatively small numbers of subscriptions. The IDEAL concept (derided at first, but then imitated by just about all publishers, and often nicknamed BigDeal) was brought about by the realisation that if access to electronic journal articles could be pooled by larger numbers of institutions, then for the same publisher’s income – the same cost therefore to the academic community – the articles would be accessible to vastly more researchers. If ever the cliché
win-win was appropriate, it was here.

Open access logically follows on from that. The challenge was – still is – to find appropriate economic models to sustain professional scientific publishing with open access. The recently agreed arrangements between Springer and the Max Planck Gesellschaft, the UKB (all the Dutch universities plus the Royal Library), and Göttingen University, may point to a way forward. All articles from these institutions in Springer journals are published with open access under these arrangements.

If the underlying motive is, however, to get the most out of the scientific knowledge that has been gathered, which it is in my case, then moving on from open access to the semantic web – the concept web, if you wish – feels, at least to me, an entirely logical step. Not all knowledge after all is captured in journal articles. There is much more besides those, in databases, for instance, and in less formal web conversations. (A case can even be made that journal publishing ‘destroys’ data, for instance by reducing them to simple pixels in graphs, taking away the underlying richness of the data). Also, the connections between knowledge fragments are not always easily made purely by reading journal articles, in may areas a problem exacerbated by the sheer numbers of articles published. And all relevant. We are in a situation of overwhelming – and growing – abundance of scientific information, and methods that deal with that abundance are clearly needed. This is what Knewco people are working on, and I am very excited to join them.

Jan Velterop

*IDEAL: International Desktop Electronic Access Library – APPEAL: Academic Press Print and Electronic Access Licence

Charity and recycled paper

2008-03-04T11:27:00.003Z

I don't think that assertions such as "...not all OA journals charge anything from either authors or readers..." or even "...the majority of OA journals do not charge anybody..." are very helpful for achieving widespread open access. One does come across them regularly, though. It seems more to do with the desire not to spend anything, or rather, to see that if any money is to be spent, it's done by 'someone else'. They may be mathematically correct, though.

The trouble is, 'journal' is in many respects the wrong entity in this regard. It may be a convenient one, but that doesn't make it right. Journals come in all different sizes. They range from publishing a few articles a year to publishing thousands. The variability is such, and the tail of minuscule journals so long, that I wouldn't even be surprised if it turns out that the smallest 50% of journals altogether represent less than 10% of articles published (I didn't do the calculation, but that's my sense).

I wonder, therefore, if the assertions above hold up if one looks at modal journals (i.e. journals with a modal number of peer-reviewed articles published per year; or perhaps journals with a modal impact factor).

Even if that should be the case, there is another issue. A while ago, I publicly pondered the question whether any of the non-charging OA journals (the ones that charge neither author nor reader) would be acceptable venues for articles that are the subject of funder mandates, such as the NIH or the Wellcome Trust. Not too many, I suspect. So far, I've heard or seen no answers to that question.

The non-charging OA journals are likely to operate on the fringe of scientific and scholarly publishing, and although they no-doubt have their function in the landscape, drawing this kind of attention to them at best takes away the focus from the mainstay of the academic peer-reviewed literature, and at worst, destroys these small journals, as there would be no way of coping with a flood of submissions without charging anyone.

It is relatively easy to sustain small fringe journals (some of them may be of very high quality, of course, though those are likely to cater to very small communities) on what the Dutch would call "charity and recycled paper" (liefdewerk oud papier). That's not scalable to the peer-review literature as a whole. Open access deserves to be taken more seriously.

Jan Velterop

Survival of uncertainty, or uncertainty of survival?

2008-02-04T11:22:00.000Z

On Sunday, February 3rd, Peter Suber, on his Open Access News blog, wrote in his comments to a post by Kevin Kelly, that "[new] business models aren't just good ideas, for example, to make OA possible. They are necessities for survival. For publishers, self-interest should be the primary driver for OA."

I fully agree with Peter. I have always approached open access publishing with this as my adage. My previous posting is pointing to some of the ways in which such new business models can develop.

However, a large and prominent school of thought in OA advocacy seems to argue the opposite. Namely that publishers aren't threatened by OA. "Look at physics", they say, "and you'll see that even though almost all articles are freely available in ArXiv, and have done so for more than a decade, subscriptions to physics journals survive as if nothing has happened."

Now, is OA necessary for survival, or not, since there is no threat to survival at all? Are these opposing views a sign of OA-diversity, or a kind of quantum effect like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?

Jan Velterop

Planck cheque - max. access

2008-02-04T10:23:00.001Z

The Max Planck Gesellschaft (Max Planck Society) have agreed a deal with Springer that includes immediate open access for all articles by Max Planck researchers that are accepted, after peer review, for publication in Springer journals.

This is one of a few - so far experimental - deals, similar in nature (the others are with the UKB - a consortium of the Universities and the Royal Library of The Netherlands - and with the Georg-August University of Göttingen in Germany) that aim to find a way forward in reconciling the desire for universal and immediate open access to peer-reviewed scientific journal articles with the need to ensure the economic sustainability of peer-reviewed journals.

Implicit in these arrangements is that they mix the subscription model with the author-side payment model during a transition to a fully and properly funded open access model across a whole spectrum of journals and disciplines. In the process, any differences in the ability to publish with immediate open access (the 'gold' route) between well-funded and poorly funded disciplines are evened out.

These experiments could quite conceivably see an increase in article submissions to Springer journals by authors from Max Planck Institutes, Dutch universities, and the University of Göttingen, particularly where the choice of journals for those authors is between a Springer journal which will publish with OA and a more or less equivalent journal, in terms of status, impact factor and the like, from another publisher. In fact, such an increase is expected, over time.

In any event, even without such further increases, these arrangements already entail a substantial growth in the number of high-quality peer-reviewed open access articles.

Jan Velterop

Charcuterie de science

2008-02-03T11:51:00.000Z

“Gaming the system” is something that inevitably occurs whenever the quantitative outcomes matter (such as impact factors, usage statistics, number of articles on a CV, money, et cetera). Salami-slicing, the subject of a current thread on Liblicense-l, is just one of the ways of gaming the system. I’m not completely convinced that salami-slicing (or even auto-plagiarism, though that goes rather further, of course) is all that unethical. Or rather, that it is more unethical than, say, mutual citation cliques, boosting a journal’s impact factor by publishing review articles, improving usage statistics and impact factors by publishing with open access, et cetera. In the ‘ego-system’ of science, they’re all ways of gaming the system.

The gist of the discussion on Liblicense-l is that salami-slicing is bad. The motives of salami-slicing authors are presented as suspect, and there are strong suggestions that salami-slicing is bad for science.

As always, in discussions like this, the definition of what is salami-slicing is nor clear. In other words, how thin is a slice? Multiple publication of the same article is even brought under topic. But let’s take as a definition that salami-slicing is the practice of publishing a series of articles in each of which just one, or a small number, of a larger array of connected contributions to knowledge are presented, that could have been presented in one, more substantial article. For instance, "a inhibits b" (just one finding of a set that includes "a inhibits c, and f, and n, and p, and enhances the actions of h, of k, and of z"). Is it really bad for science if these findings are salami-sliced for publication?

I’m not sure, but mining the data from such articles with small units of information may conceivably be easier than mining them from articles that present the whole lot. Or it may make no difference. In certain disciplines, where automated analysis of articles is overtaking actual reading, it may even be desirable and should be the future of science publication. Salami-slicing may come close to publishing entries one by one in a database. If peer-reviewed entries in databases were to give their authors the same sort of acknowledgement as journal articles do, and ‘the system’ (those who decide on funding, promotion, tenure, et cetera) would formally recognise such contributions to science, would we still get upset about salami-slicing?

Gaming the system is human, and it happens in all walks of life, all the time. Usually it’s the result of flaws in the system. In science it is among the survival mechanisms, an evolutionary adaptation, if you wish, to the stresses of the ego-system, and it is done in all manner of guises. Isn’t freely disseminating peer-reviewed research results that are published in journals, by depositing in open repositories, while expecting the journals to continue to be paid for via subscriptions (i.e. via mechanisms intended for and dependent on exclusivity of dissemination), also a way of gaming the system? Ideas about correcting the flaw in the system that makes this particular form of gaming it possible range from stricter copyright enforcement (i.e. abolishing ‘green’ and not publishing if copyright isn’t transferred to the publisher), to open access publishing (i.e. securing payment for the services rendered, via article processing charges, subsidies, and the like). Obviously, the second idea has my preference.

Jan Velterop

Open access and publishing

2008-01-29T12:24:00.000Z

On 24 January, the UK Serials Group (UKSG) published The E-Resources Management Handbook. I contributed a chapter to it on Open access and publishing. It is freely available from the UKSG site.

Jan Velterop

Plagiarise, don't let anything evade your eyes

2008-01-26T14:48:00.000Z

Title taken from a song by Tom Lehrer

A commentary in Nature suggested that duplicate publication is on the increase. Mostly autoplagiarism, apparently, as it seems that the majority of these duplicates share at least one author. A few studies are referenced that suggest a relatively low number of plagiarised articles, but a much higher number of suspected duplicates with the same authors. And it is suggested that those have been published simultaneously, which is, of course, not easy to achieve for alloplagiarism ("simultaneous publication is rarely observed for duplicates that do not share authors").

It also suggested that duplicate publication is bad, particularly in areas like clinical research ("Duplication, particularly of the results of patient trials, can negatively affect the practice of medicine, as it can instill a false sense of confidence regarding the efficacy and safety of new drugs and procedures"). This is no-doubt true, but one wonders if this negative effect is anything other than minor, given the rather widespread publication biases when it comes to clinical trials, such as this one regarding the treatment of depression with selective serotonin reuptake (SSRI) inhibitors: "Thirty-seven studies were assessed by the FDA as positive and, with one exception, every single one of those positive trials got properly written up and published. Meanwhile, 22 studies that had negative or iffy results were simply not published at all, and 11 were written up and published in a way that described them as having a positive outcome." (Ben Goldacre in The Guardian of January 26, 2008). Judging the scientific validity of findings just by counting articles is clearly pretty primitive.

Autoplagiarism is seen as ethically questionable, to say the least. According to the authors of the Nature commentary, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, "it not only artificially inflates an author's publication record but places an undue burden on journal editors and reviewers, and is expressly forbidden by most journal copyright rules."

This is undoubtedly true as well, but again, placed in context it may be dwarfed by the burden on journal editors and reviewers imposed by the cascading effect of the whole publication process, with its cycle of submission, rejection, submission to another journal, rejection by that other journal, and so forth, until the article is finally published somewhere, meanwhile peer-reviewed at every stage.

What if the motives of autoplagiarising authors are more benign? What if they just want to ensure a wide dissemination of their work and they see multiple publication as a way to achieve that? One might say that publishing in a journal that offers open access would be a better way of doing that, or self-archiving in an open repository (and I would certainly be in favour of publishing with open access). But a quick look at the various open access advocacy email lists shows that cross-posting is rife, even though the archives of such lists are completely open. That complete openness is evidently not being regarded as sufficient by the cross-posting posters to get the attention desired. Multi-publication may in essence be the same phenomenon, or at least driven by the same motives. Is it so much different from having multiple versions of an article, as in one in a journal, another one in a central repository, another one in an institutional repository, et cetera? Sure, those should all refer to the same formally published article, so the authors can't get extra credits for them, so maybe it is very different. But hey, the scientific ego-system is a pretty cut-throat arena, and multiple publication seems amongst the smaller of possible misdemeanors, with a least the positive effect of wider dissemination of research results.

I am not convinced that autoplagiarism is anything other than a minor problem in science. It seems to me that non-publication of negative results is a problem of an order of magnitude greater. It is high time that this bias is addressed, and with the kind of indignation now seemingly accorded to autoplagiarism.

Interesting irony:

A Google search on 'non-publication of negative results in 2007' (search done on 26 January 2008, 16:30 GMT) shows as first result an article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, with the link:
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1067502707000394 which leads to a screen saying "The article you requested is not currently available online".

Further down in the Google results is a link to an abstract that seems to be from the same article, and it is online, albeit not open. From the abstract: reasons why studies were not published range from "results not of interest for others" (1/3of all studies), "publication in preparation" (1/3), "no timefor publication" (1/5), "limited scientific quality of study"(1/6), "political or legal reasons" (1/7), and "study only conductedfor internal use" (1/8).

Jan Velterop

Reviewed reviews

2008-01-18T14:27:00.000Z

"Book self-archiving cannot and should not be mandated, for the contrary of much the same reasons peer-reviewed journal articles can and should be."
Stevan Harnad
18 January 2008
contribution to liblicense-l

I agree with him.

I think.

Why I can't be entirely certain is because by peer-reviewed journal articles he may mean the same as the NIH in the description of the types of articles that fall under the mandate, which says:

"The Policy applies to all peer-reviewed journal articles, including research reports and reviews. The Policy does not apply to non-peer-reviewed materials such as correspondence, book chapters, and editorials."

That's a mistake, in my view. Review articles belong in the second sentence, with editorials and the like; not the first. More often than not, review articles are initiated by a publisher, inviting a distinguished author to write one. More often than not the author is offered some payment for writing it. Seldom if ever is a review article the result of a funded research project.

Review articles have a lot in common with books. And if self-archiving of books "cannot and should not be mandated", the same applies, grosso modo, to review articles.

Even OA publisher par excellence, BioMed Central, requires subscriptions to access review articles, for instance in the journal Breast Cancer Research. I think they are right to do that. It will be interesting, though, to see how BMC will deal with the NIH requirement to self-archive review articles. Willl the 12 months' embargo be enough? They currently make these articles freely available after two years ("freely available online to registered users", which isn't quite the same as open access, but maybe that distinction is for pedants only). They could just avoid inviting authors with NIH grants to write review articles, of course.

Jan Velterop

Taking the trip without paying the ship? Episode 2

2008-01-08T10:57:00.000Z

Peter Suber, on his Open Access News blog, has made several comments on my previous posting. They all warrant a response, but first I'd like to make the general point that much of what separates the OA-advocacy sphere from the publishing sphere comes down to deep-rooted and stubborn differences of perception.

Such as the idea that researches 'give away' their papers to publishers. It certainly doesn't feel that way on the side of the publishers. There it feels like being asked to perform a service. That's why the process is known as 'submission' and not as 'donation'. Besides, if all this 'giving away' is a bad thing, why would scientists continue to do it? They may be many things, but they're not stupid.

Or the idea that the information in articles is being 'locked-up' by publishers for the sake of control. As far as publishers are concerned, any scientist is completely free to self-publish his articles on his own web sites or in repositories. What causes the 'lock-up' (at least until subscriptions are replaced by other ways of paying for publishers' services) is the requirement to publish in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Not a requirement imposed by publishers. That is not to say that it isn't a useful requirement. One of the main roles of publishers is to provide the structure for a professional, timely and efficient peer-review process to take place, on the scale necessary. Anybody can organise peer review of their own papers and decide not to bother a publisher with it, just as anybody can buy their eggs and wheat from a farmer and proceed to bake their own cake. Both happen, though most people have no time for it, find that they lack the requisite skills, or just find it downright boring. Publishers -- and bakers -- are there to professionalise and speed up that process, offering to take the hassle out of the hands of scientists leaving them to spend their time on where their real interests lie: doing science.

Back to Peter's comments:

"Subscription journals and mandated open access are not compatible." Jan's argument depends on the high level of OA archiving, whether that level is caused by a mandate or by a successful disciplinary culture of self-archiving. It therefore predicts that the near-100% level of OA archiving in physics would kill off subscription journals in physics. But that is not what we see when we look. On the contrary: the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) have seen no cancellations to date attributable to OA archiving. In fact, both now host mirrors of arXiv and accept submissions from it. They have become symbiotic with OA archiving. We may or may not see the same symbiosis in other fields, as their levels of OA archiving rise to levels now seen in physics. But the experience in physics is enough to falsify the flat prediction that subscription journals and high-volume OA archiving are incompatible. For more on the question whether high-volume OA archiving will cause libraries to cancel subscription journals, see my article from September 2007 (esp. Sections 4-10).

First of all, my argument doesn't depend on a high level of OA-archived content to be valid. If there is a high level of OA content, then potential cancellations are the issue. At a lower level, we see an expectation -- increasingly a demand -- for reductions in the subscription fee. You could call that 'partial cancellation' if you wish. As for the idea that the field of high energy physics demonstrates that subscriptions and self-archiving are compatible, I do wonder why it is that the SCOAP3 initiative was taken. The compatibility that seems to exists in high energy physics is like the fluidity of supercooled water. SCOAP3, the idea of which is to abolish subscriptions altogether, will be the dropping in of the coin around which that water quickly solidifies as ice.

The incompatibility of subscriptions and OA (whether self-archived or otherwise) is as fundamental as the melting point is to supercooled water. In exceptional circumstances, temporary unstable states can occur. I accept that, pragmatically, this unstable state of pseudo-compatibility can occur for a while and runaway cancellations won't necessarily take place until the penny drops properly.

The second of his comments:

Jan assumes that all OA journals charge author-side publication fees. ("They don't give authors a choice and simply refuse to publish articles unless they are paid for by article processing charges....") But in fact most OA journals charge no publication fees. Last month, Bill Hooker's survey of all full-OA journals in the DOAJ found that 67% charged no publication fees. The month before, Caroline Sutton and I found that 83% of society OA journals charged no publication fees.

I'm certainly not assuming that all OA journals charge author-side fees, and I have no reason to doubt the numbers that Bill Hooker and Peter and Caroline come up with. Since the topic at hand was the NIH mandate, however, the question that I have is how many of those 70 to 80% of non-fee-charging OA journals would be acceptable journals for NIH-grantees to publish in?

His third comment:

If "paying the ticket" means paying the publication fee at a fee-based OA journal, then there are two replies. First, the NIH already allows grantees to spend grant funds on such fees. Second, but the NIH does not, and should not, require grantees to publish in OA journals. There aren't yet enough peer-reviewed OA journals in biomedicine to contain the NIH output; and even if there were, such a requirement would severely limit the freedom of authors to publish in the journals of their choice. That's why all funder mandates worldwide focus on green OA, not gold OA.

The freedom of authors to publish in the journals of their choice is important. I fully agree with that. The fact that this is seen as such an important tenet of academic freedom only serves to underscore how important journals are for other reasons than just distribution. That is why I argue that all journals should offer at least the option of immediate OA, and I do take the point of there not being enough journals yet that offer it. (By the way, a journal that offers immediate OA isn’t the same as an OA journal. Journals that offer OA include ‘hybrid’ journals. As the Bethesda Statement clearly says: “Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers”.)

The NIH should indeed not require publishing in OA journals and journals that offer OA as an option. But if they are truly aiming to have, eventually, a solid and sustainable OA publishing system, they could at least advise publishing with OA and make clearer and more widely known that they allow grantees to spend grant funds on article processing fees for immediate open access.

Peter's last comment, an extensive one:

If "paying the ticket" means paying for peer review even at TA journals, when grantees submit their work to TA journals, then the reply is somewhat different. TA journals are already compensated by subscription revenue for organizing peer review. The NIH mandate will protect their subscriptions by delaying OA for up to 12 months and by providing OA only to author manuscripts rather than to published articles. In the September 2007 article I mentioned above (Section 6), I list four incentives for libraries to continue their subscriptions even after an OA mandate. If the argument is that these protections don't suffice, and that the risk to publishers is too great, then my answer is that Congress and the NIH have to balance the interests of publishers with the interests of researchers and the public. Here's how I described that balance last August:

Publishers like to say that they add value by facilitating peer review by expert volunteers. This is accurate but one-sided. What they leave out is that the funding agency adds value as well, and that the cost of a research project is often thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. If adding value gives one a claim to control access to the result, then at least two stakeholder organizations have that claim, and one of them has a much weightier claim than the publisher. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then the right question is not which side to favor, without compromise, but which compromise to favor. So far I haven't heard a better solution than a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public....Publishers who want to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, are saying that there should be no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers.

The first two sentences sound suspiciously like "free-riding on the bus is OK, because the bus company is already compensated by the revenue from season ticket holders". I'm pretty sure that is not what he means, but what does he mean?

His reasoning on the balance struck is also shaky. Yes, publishers do add value, but why is saying so implying that they are the only ones adding value? And they don't claim to control access. They have to as long as there is no widely accepted other way for them to charge for the value they add than subscriptions. That's the beauty of author-side payment: it naturally removes the need to control access that comes with the subscription model. 'Gold' -- paying for the services you ask a publisher to perform -- is so much cleaner than messing around with compromised subscriptions and embargoes. And it would result in OA immediately upon publication as well, and not 12 months later.

Anyway, perhaps this NIH mandate is a spur for publishers and societies to accelerate moving to 'gold', at least for articles falling under these mandates.

Jan Velterop

Taking the trip without paying the ship?

2008-01-06T19:45:00.001Z

‘Twas the time of peace on Earth, making merry for some, serious contemplation for others, and infantilisation for others still, if I read the blog and list postings of the last few weeks. And combinations of all of the above, of course. Many of those who favour Open Access have reason to be happy, since the NIH mandate has passed all its hurdles in the US legislature and is becoming law. Albeit, oh irony, as stowaway in a spending bill that allocates nigh unlimited funds to war, a small fraction of which would have made the entire academic literature published since the dawn of modern science open to anyone in the whole world. A bag of sweets hidden in a barge of poison. It is a shame the mandate couldn’t make it on its own.

What is it all about?

The mandate in the bill requires researchers, authors, to deposit the articles resulting from their NIH-funded research immediately in PubMed Central and then make them open after 12 months at the latest. Read thus, the whole thing is ostensibly taking place outside the purview of publishers, as it is not they who are mandated to do anything. There’s even a positive message for many of them, if they are willing to hear it. Open access is, after all, a desirable thing, politically and scientifically. And it is not just any articles resulting from their research that grantees are mandated to deposit and make open within 12 months, it is their published, peer-reviewed articles. So what publishers have to do is make sure they offer authors open access – or at least embargoed open access – to the articles for which they, the publishers, arrange peer-review and then formal publication in a journal.

How they do that is the question. Most journals get ‘paid’ for their efforts by the authors’ transfer of copyright. This copyright they then subsequently ‘trans-substantiate’ into money via subscriptions. What an embargo does is simply to make this ‘payment’ of copyright worth less. For some journals, an embargo of 12 months will make little difference. The time-sensitive currency of the information published in those titles demands that libraries need to subscribe to get immediate access anyway. For those, the ‘value’ of copyright is not eroded. But for other journals, the ones that publish less time-sensitive material, a mandate is possibly devastating, a double whammy, removing the incentive to pay both on the part of the librarian, who judges that his or her constituency can wait 12 months for access, as well as on the part of the author, who, given the option, may judge that his or her readers can wait 12 months for access. Subscription journals and mandated open access are not compatible. Only journals run on entirely charitable support can survive this way.

Fully open access journals stand somewhat outside the pitch as observers of the spectacle, since they have already understood that being dependent on what governments may allow you as a term in which to sell subscriptions is just too risky. They don't give authors a choice and simply refuse to publish articles unless they are paid for by article processing charges, a.k.a. author-side publication fees. Subscription-based journals and hybrid journals (those that offer paid-for open access as an option) are the ones likely to suffer, although hybrid journals have the possibility too, of course, to remove the non-OA option for NIH-funded research articles and behave exactly like a full OA journal towards NIH-grantees.

Surely, the stowaway analogy doesn’t go further than the mandate simply being buried in the bowels of the bill, does it? Surely, the free-readership mandate doesn’t imply free-ridership, too, does it? Surely, the mandate doesn’t imply that NIH-funded researchers are compelled to take the trip without paying for the ticket? If so, the bill is fundamentally a dishonest one. If it isn’t a dishonest one, surely the NIH will clearly indicate that it is entirely legitimate, and advisable, for authors to spend a small percentage of their grant money – estimates range from 1 to 2 percent – on the article processing fees for publication with immediate open access?

If the bill really should be the fundamentally dishonest variety feared, one of ‘taking the trip without paying the ship’, then this OA ‘victory’ will, alas, turn out to be a Pyrrhic one. A short-term pseudo-success at the cost of a long-term open access solution. A palliative that ultimately kills instead of a treatment that ultimately cures.

Advocates of true, immediate, and sustainable open access, as an integral part of research, may still have a long way to go.

Happy 2008!

Jan Velterop

JAM tomorrow

2007-11-09T15:17:00.000Z

On Wednesday November 7, 2007, in an entry called ‘More JAM about the NIH policy’, Peter Suber alerts us all to the fact that Nature, The Washington Post, Slashdot, and many others, got it wrong: the NIH policy is not about mandating its grantees to publish in OA journals, it is just about mandating them to deposit their articles, that is to say an “electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts” in PubMed Central “upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication”.

Indeed, as Suber says correctly, "The policy would require deposit in an OA repository (PubMed Central), not submission to OA journals. It's about green OA, not gold OA."

Unfortunately, in the perception of many – Nature, The Washington Post, and Slashdot surely don’t have a subversive agenda, but just report what is widely perceived – this distinction is of a level usually associated with copyrightlawyerly hairsplitteralcy. Apart from the fact that perceptional closeness is literally the case for the colours gold and green (have a look at hex colour 999933, which is often used on web pages to depict gold), the simple fact is that ‘gold’ and ‘green’ roads to OA are just easily confused. The somewhat enigmatic sentence added in the Congressional Bill: “Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law” doesn’t make it any better. Nor does the idea of an embargo. Why allowing an embargo on making an author’s manuscript openly available? Or, put in another way, isn’t allowing a 12 months’ delay tantamount to saying that making a final manuscript freely available (‘green’) is, in effect, publishing? If it isn’t, why not insist on the manuscript being made open immediately upon acceptance? And what does “official date of publication” mean? The date the author’s version of the article first appears on the publisher’s web site? The date the fully formatted and copy-edited version first appears on the publisher’s web site? The cover date of the print issue in which the article (eventually) appears?

Is it really just “ignorance and misunderstanding” that leads to this quite persistent confusion? Or is there perhaps something subliminal or too subtle in the distinction between ‘green’ and ‘gold’ that wrong-foots otherwise intelligent people?

Applied to OA, ‘green’ and ‘gold’ are qualifiers of a different order. ‘Gold’ is straightforward: you pay for the service of being published in a peer-reviewed journal and your article is unambiguously Open Access. ‘Green’, however, is little more than an indulgence allowed by the publisher. This, for most publishers at least, is fine, as long as it doesn’t undermine their capability to make money with the work they do. But a 'green' policy is reversible.

This is not to say that the NIH policy isn’t going to be effective in bringing OA closer. It may very well be. But quite possibly not via ‘green’ (is it not time to realise that ‘green’ isn’t the fast and sure way to open access that it is often made out to be?).

Embargoes are the policies that will bring OA closer. Why? An embargo carries the risk for a publisher that both the reader (read: librarian) and the author can just afford to wait. Especially if embargoes should get shorter than 12 months. And if they can afford to wait, there is no need or incentive on either side to pay anything to anybody. For publishers, there are only two ways out, and neither involves ‘green’: to refuse articles from NIH grantees unless they come with some form of cash payment or exclusive rights. ‘Gold’ publishers already do that; they get paid in cash when they accept and publish an article. No cash, no publication. Subscription publishers get paid in the form of rights that are transferred to them. Copyrights, mostly, or at least exclusive publication rights (if and where there is a difference between those two). And those rights will look a lot less exclusive and therefore lose a lot in value under an embargo regime. So actually, it comes down to just one way, since the exclusive rights route is a mere cul-de-sac leading nowhere, all but closed off by embargoes. Or perhaps the other is stopping journal publishing altogether.

For hitherto ‘green’ publishers, to turn to ‘gold’ and join the already existing OA publishers in only inviting submission of manuscripts by NIH grantees that, should they be accepted for publication, come with publication fees in one way or another, will be an increasingly attractive option.

Jan Velterop

Of publishing and marketing

2007-07-20T12:02:00.000+01:00

Recently, on Peter Murray-Rust's blog, Bill Hooker's blog, and quite a few others, the definition of 'Open Access' was discussed. In the spirit of open access and clarity we are told that "Open Access is not a marketing phrase and you are not free to use it as you see fit", "Free Advertising isn't Open Access in my book", and "Open Access cannot be used as marketing gimmick and the definition should always be clear to everyone."

It's interesting that attention should be drawn to advertising and marketing. It is advertising and marketing that most of publishing in journals is about. Researchers don't need journals if it is just to 'give away' their research to the world, if they just want to 'share' their knowledge. They can just post it on some well-read web site or deposit it in an open repository and, hey, the proverbial Bob's your uncle. But no, that ain't enough. They need to advertise their scientific prowess, their priority, to officialdom, in order to get tenure, status, future funding, et cetera, and they use formal publication in peer-reviewed journals for that.

Nothing wrong with that, but let's be straight. You wouldn't consider submitting your article to a journal that doesn't market and promote itself.

"Free Advertising isn't Open Access in my book."

No, it isn't in my book, either. Free advertising of your article is publishing it in a subscription journal, so that you don't have to pay for it, but librarians do, so it's free to you.

"Open Access is not a marketing phrase and you are not free to use it as you see fit."

Open access is just as much - or as little - a marketing phrase as 'subscription' is, in all the inherent ambiguity and variation of those terms. Or is there anybody out there who believes that the definition of Open Access is (can be) completely unique, unequivocal and impervious to interpretation? Well, some work is needed on the current definition(s),then. Even if it were enshrined in some statute book as the law, it would still be open to interpretation. Don't take it from me: ask any lawyer.

Do I think that improvements in labelling open access could be made? Of course I do. And they will be, in a process of trial and error, and rich discussion, perhaps rather like scientific insights get refined and mature. To claim that "the definition should always be clear to everyone" is naive.

Perhaps it should be clear, but it ain't. How do I, for instance, interpret the phrase "the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use" in the open access definition? That's a limitation of rights, correct? So that's reflected - though not perfectly - in the Creative Commons BY-NC licence. If there were a Creative Commons licence that specifically dealt with this 'right to make small numbers of printed copies for personal use', then we could perhaps use that one rather than the BY-NC licence with its to scientific publishing irrelevant elements. But to my knowledge, at the time of writing this, there isn't one (if there is, I'd be all too happy to be enlightened). On the other hand, if you look at the 'non-commercial' restriction in the BY-NC licence, you may be forgiven to wonder what the fuss is about:

"You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You [...] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works."

Jan Velterop

Fly or flounder

2007-07-16T14:02:00.000+01:00

If one looks at scientific information from an economic point of view, and considers supply and demand, it will probably look like this: In an area mainly driven by readers who clamour to see the research (a 'read-or-rot' area), subscriptions make sense; in an area mainly driven by the need to publish (a 'publish-or-perish' area, arguably the most common in science), article processing charges for open access publishing makes sense; and in an area mainly driven by political or other overarching societal concerns ('fly-or-flounder'?), direct subsidies make sense.

The question is, can one, or should one, look at scientific information in this way. The answer is, in my view at least, 'yes'.

Science research activity, including the publishing of research results, is clearly an economic activity, with supply and demand, so that would definitely argue for the 'yes' vote. But are the three scenarios mentioned above of equal importance? Scientific information is to a very large degree a 'product' for which supply and demand are overlapping, suppliers (authors) being 'demanders' (in their role as readers) - and vice versa. With regard to formally publishing scientific findings, the demands placed on the system by 'suppliers' are, in general, much stronger than the demands placed on it by readers. What I've often heard in research circles is that as a scientist, you can mostly get away with reading only a selection of relevant literature (the rest being of a confirmatory nature, so seeing the abstract is enough, or even just knowing that an article exists), or rather, you must, because there's an information overload in most disciplines and you wouldn't be able to read it all anyway. As an author, though, there's no escape: you have to publish.

Of the three scenarios mentioned, the last two are arguably the most important. Yet the overwhelming majority of the economic activity takes place in the framework of scenario 1. That's an 'issue' (euphemism for 'problem') and our challenge is to make the transition to scenarios 2 and 3 while keeping the crucial elements of the system of formal publishing intact and economically viable, especially peer-review.

Jan Velterop

Mandate debate

2007-03-04T13:37:00.000Z

Peter Suber is weighing in on the mandate debate. In one of the comments on my previous post on his blog (March 3, 2007) he says the following about his own position on mandates:

"One objection is that a mandate paternalistically coerces [authors] for their own good. If true, this would be a serious problem for me, though perhaps not for everyone who defends mandates. I cannot support paternalism over competent adults....Fortunately, the paternalism objection misses the target and is easily answered....First, I only support mandates that are conditions on voluntary contracts. They might be funding contracts: if you take our money, you'll have to provide OA to your research; if this bothers you, then don't take our money. They might be employment contracts: if you work here, you'll have to provide OA to your research; if this bothers you, then don't work here....Second, I only support mandates with reasonable exceptions....Third, an OA mandate [advances other interests beyond the author's]. The [author] interest is greater visibility and impact. The university [or funder] interest is that an OA mandate will better fulfill the university [or funder] mission to share the knowledge it produces, and better assist researchers elsewhere who could benefit from this knowledge...."

Peter is a philosopher, and thus can be expected to be more careful with choosing his words than a mere mortal like me. Yet I cannot square the idea of a mandate, given its usual definition of 'an official or authoritative command; an order', with the idea of a condition, a stipulation, in a voluntary contract. If you mean starter pistol, don't say machine gun. You might confuse some people. If you mean contract stipulation, don't say mandate. Such a heavy word is, well, too 'loaded' (no pun intended).

And how voluntary is a funding contract actually? Only in the sense that if you don't sign, you have the option of leaving science altogether. In comparison, the condition in a voluntary contract that asks authors to transfer their copyright to a publisher seems a very mild and decidedly benign one, especially if the publisher is 'green'.

Jan Velterop

Challenge for open access

2007-03-03T12:19:00.001Z

(This is a long post. If you don't want to read it all, go straight to the last two paragraphs.)

Stevan Harnad has posted his “Challenge to OA Publishers” in some form or other on a number of email lists and after I responded on two lists (I chopped my response up for clarity, and to make it possible to discuss each issue he raised separately), I became aware that he has posted a similar, maybe the same, piece on other lists as well. Perhaps a response on The Parachute is more efficient than posting to all these lists. I will still separate the issues out, and my responses here will differ in some detail from the ones I have posted on the AMSCI and SOAF lists, as I now have the benefit of having received responses to my responses, as many off-line as on the lists themselves (the latter can be found in the archives of the respective lists).

I identified at least seven issues in Stevan’s piece that I think are misconceptions and misunderstandings.

Misconception 1: The idea that publishers and the research establishment are each other’s natural adversaries.

Stevan pits the interests of science publishers against the interests of "research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research." This seems to assume that the researchers establishment lives in a parallel universe to the one in which science publishers live – a universe which is not 'tainted' by anything that might appear to have anything to do with economics or business.

That doesn’t appear to be particularly perspicacious or observant. The interests of the global scientific enterprise and publishing enterprises are necessarily in line with one another. Stevan himself makes the point that "...research publishing [...] is a service [...]. It will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa." Quite right. Precisely because publishing is a service, the interests of the global research enterprise are in line with the interests of publishers. No service industry can survive by rendering services that are against the interests of its clientèle. In fact, publishing is so intertwined with academia that it is part of the global research enterprise. Access to – and sustainability of – formal publication channels (a.k.a. journals) are two lattices of the same clear crystal.

Somewhat cryptically, Stevan dismisses this as ideology, and adds his ceterum censeo* that an OA publisher, by definition pro-OA, cannot at the same time withhold support for a mandate to self-archive non-OA-published material. This brings us to:

Misconception 2: OA publishers opposing OA.

Stevan Harnad calls it "disappointing, if not deplorable" if OA publishers take a stance "against Open Access itself." I couldn't agree more, if that were indeed the case. But it isn't. It's an absurd notion that they are.

'Gold' OA publishers are definitely for open access. Strongly so. And they are not against 'green' (open self-archiving of authors’ manuscript versions). After all, they endorse 'green'. They are just not necessarily so fanatically for it to support a self-archiving mandate (which is not the same as an OA mandate) for non OA-published materials. Stevan seems to adhere to the idea that says: "if you're not entirely, unquestioningly, and unequivocally for an open self-archiving mandate, you're against open access." To illustrate why this is rather absurd, imagine being strongly in favour of promoting health through physical exercise. Does it follow that if you do not support a mandate for everyone to run the half-marathon every week, your health-promoting credentials are questionable?

Needless to say, Stevan’s response to the above consists of his ceterum censeo.

Misconception 3: Publishers think protecting their risks outweighs the benefits of OA.

Stevan mentions two risks that publishers face. The risk of OA self-archiving mandates undermining subscription income and the risk of authors (or their institutions and funders) not willing to pay enough for OA publishing. Perhaps unlike some tenured scientists, publishers are used to living with risk. And there are more than the ones Stevan mentions. For instance the risk of not engaging in OA at all.

When Stevan talks about the 'benefits of OA' he means the benefits of having open access to the formally published, peer-reviewed and certified literature. OA to research results themselves is easy enough. Authors can just post their work on n'importe quel web server.

Outfits that are asked to arrange this formal publication process are known as 'publishers'. The benefits of OA are the benefits of access to the formal literature. Without 'publishers' (who are not necessarily the ones currently in existence, of course), there is no formal literature. The risk to publishers (or rather, the journals that they publish) is the risk to the benefits of OA.

Stevan’s response to this point? You guessed it: ceterum censeo.

Misconception 4: Articles are a 'product', presented as a 'gift' to publishers.

Though the difference between 'product' and 'service' is somewhat artificial (some speak of a 'service product'), what publishers have provided has always been a 'service'. The service consisted - and still consists - of arranging all that's necessary to make a scientifically non-recognised piece of work (pretty much 'worthless' for the scientific establishment), into a scientifically recognised addition to the knowledge pool (a valuable piece of work, identifiable as such by the fact that it is formally published in a peer-reviewed journal).

For the purpose of communicating information it may be good enough, but for the purpose of constituting the scientific record what the author delivers is only raw material, at best a semi-product, an intermediate good.

I was criticised by Andrew Adams (of the University of Reading in the UK) for the use of the word ‘worthless’ here. He has a point and I haven’t been clear enough why I used that word. Andrew thought it was an indication of my "contempt for the scientist as author and communicator." Let me categorically say that I do not harbour the least contempt for scientists as writers and communicators. Far from it. I used the word 'worthless' in inverted commas. Informal research papers are far from worthless in my opinion. But scientific culture insists on formally published research papers for things like priority, tenure, funding, recognition of researchers and recognition of the scientific record (at least in many disciplines, and there may well be exceptions, where formal journals are indeed not necessary). If they are not formally published, they simply don't count. So informal publications are not at all worthless per se; but they are seen as pretty 'worthless' in the context of career advancement in science. Most scientists are not fortunate enough not to need to have a list of formal publications to their CV in order to earn the approbation of their fellow-scientists.

The prevailing scientific culture, world-wide, is extremely conscious of, and sensitive to, 'brand identities' of journals. Isn't that at the heart of the matter?

The author doesn't 'give' anything to a publisher, but instead, asks for a service. Stevan thinks that such a service should be delivered at “vastly reduced costs” (whatever that means). He is most welcome to set up as a publisher and do just that (in fact I think he has done so a long time ago already). There are virtually no barriers to entry for would-be publishers. Even less so for the minimalist 'administrators' of the publishing process if that is what he thinks publishing entails (the word ‘administrators’ was actually Andrew’s). Why is it, then, that such an approach hasn't taken over the position of the existing publishers like a storm?

But Stevan doesn't seem to like the risk that's associated with setting up such a service to replace existing journals, so he tries to off-load any risk to the existing publishers by getting politicians to mandate subversion.

OA publishers already offer the service he seeks. Authors have by now a wide range of journals with OA to choose to submit to. What is he waiting for? Well, authors' uptake. We all do.

Stevan responds to this point with:

It is interesting how Jan's financial analysis fits, indifferently, the writings author sell to their publishers for a fee, or against royalties, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the writings in question here, where the author gives them to their publishers, the peer review is likewise done for free, and all publishers do is administer it, paying no fees, no royalties.

I note that the authors of fee/royalty-based writings are not interested in making their writings OA. Researchers, the authors of the give-away writings in question, are.

He misses the point. Sure enough, the content of their articles is ‘given’ to the world by researchers in the same way that this piece I’m penning here on this blog is my ‘gift’ to the world (magnanimous of me, isn’t it?). But the ‘gift’ of an author is only accepted by the scientific establishment if it comes with a ‘certificate’. If it comes with proof that it has undergone peer-review and that it has been formally accepted for publication in a journal.

Oh, and of course he adds his ceterum censeo.

Misconception 5: Expecting non-OA journals to suffer from self-archiving mandates is hypothetical, but expecting subscriptions to continue to be paid for by institutions when the content is openly and freely available is evidence-based.

In fact, both are hypotheses, the former just more logical than the latter.

The 'evidence' that subscriptions will continue is based on the situation that subscriptions to physics journals, on the whole, seem to be co-existing with their free availability in Arxiv. As evidence goes, it doesn't deserve that moniker. It's the equivalent of saying that driving under the influence is safe, just because you've done it for years without having an accident. Or giving a number of unsupervised toddlers a packet of matches and when none of their houses have burned down by the end of the week, infer that matches are safe in the hands of toddlers.

The hypothesis that subscriptions will suffer is based on the mainstream economic observation that if goods or services are easily available for free elsewhere, it will be very difficult to sell them.

Stevan response is this:

Fact (not Hypothesis): Research today is losing access, usage and impact daily, weekly, monthly, because not all researchers can afford access to all the research they can use.

I agree. I never questioned that. He also poses this:

Fact (not Hypothesis): Journals today are not losing subscription revenue because of OA self-archiving, not even in the fields where OA has been at or near 100% for years.

I agree, too. But Stevan makes it sound a rather more generally found fact than it is. He really speaks about physics and physics alone. OK, some maths as well. Long before the web, perhaps even before Tim Berners-Lee was born, physics already developed a culture of communicating via preprints, not journals. For decades, journals have been seen as the formal record only and if they communicated anything at all, it was primarily the fact that a certain ‘label of acceptance’ (the journal reference) could be added to a given article. Arxiv, now seen as a self-archiving repository, is really the electronic manifestation of the preprint circuit that was part of the physics culture.

This ‘fact’, however (which I accept as a fact), has no predictive value. Just like the fact that not having had an accident while driving under the influence cannot be taken as evidence that you never will. The fact that physics developed a preprint culture didn't mean that most other scientific disciplines developed it, too. So why would one now believe that something that might work in physics would necessarily work elsewhere as well?

Misconception 6: If an author 'pays' for the services of a publisher by handing over rights, that payment is in addition to subscription charges.

Stevan Harnad must not have understood what I said, and it's entirely possible that I wasn't clear enough. Mea culpa. (He subsequently assured me he did understand.)

No, Stevan, you can't just add these. When an author 'pays' by transferring rights, these rights only represent 'potential' money. This 'potential' money has to be converted into 'actual' money for the publisher to be able to pay his bills. That's what subscriptions do, they convert rights into money.

Why exclusive rights? 'Exclusive' here means that the same article may not be published in more than one journal. Virtually everybody in the scientific establishment agrees with that principle. Well, not absolutely everybody. Some articles appear in more than one journal. When this happens, it is frowned upon, even regarded as scientific fraud.

The notion of an author paying seems to be anathema for Stevan. He justifies this by saying that authors ‘give’ their articles away; they are not given royalties, and not even expect to receive them.

As for royalties to the author, of course they are given, and they make sense if the publisher really wants to publish the work because in his judgement he can sell it well. For instance text-books or good review-articles. For research articles this doesn't apply, because the judgement of sales potential isn’t there. In fact, it's not up to the publisher at all to decide which article to publish and which not. Just as well. Editors and editorial boards - scientists - decide, on the basis of scientific merit, not financial potential. This is as true for subscription-based journals as it is for OA journals and hybrid ones.

Stevan responds to that with this question:

“And because referees referee (for free) and editors decide, it follows that the author should not self-archive his article?”

Did I say that it did? He then continues:

“Or that the author's funder or employer should not mandate that the fundee/employee self-archive his article?”

Did I say that it did? Funders and employers can mandate what they like. And if they are aware of the potential consequences of what they’re doing, it’s entirely up to them. If they realise the value of formal, peer-reviewed journals, as an increasing number of funders do, following the lead of the Wellcome Trust, we are finding that they are prepared to create other ways to keep the journals going than via the traditional subscription system, as long as these journals offer open access. That's the way to go.

What Stevan asks – demands – is that the publishers of those journals lobby for a mandate that articles that do not contribute to the support of these journals are nonetheless self-archived in open repositories. I refer to what I said above about healthy exercise and the compulsory half-marathon.

Stevan also says

“The logic of "excluding" the right to self-archive, or to mandate self-archiving, continues to escape me. (Could it be because I keep thinking of access and impact, and you keep thinking of funding and revenues? But then why do you portray yourself as being for OA?)”

This is a version of his ceterum censeo, of course, but who is actually excluding the right to self-archiving? The publishers, who are virtually all ‘green’? There is a difference, though, between the right to self-archive and the compulsion to do so. Stevan equates ‘OA’ to ‘a mandate to self-archive’. ‘Healthy exercise’ to ‘a compulsion to run the half marathon every week’. He’s taken his eyes off the ball of the ‘end’ and fixed them firmly onto the ‘means’.

Misconception 7: The notion that OA publishing takes away from scarce research funds.

I'm tempted to start believing in one of the religions of the physics domain, parallel universes. Stevan seems to live in the universe where OA publishing - 'gold' - costs money and subscriptions don't.

In the universe where I live, formal publishing in peer-reviewed journals costs money. Luckily, Stevan agrees. In that universe, research budget allocations and research grants typically include earmarked overhead charges. These overhead charges are taken by the research institution to pay for all manner of infrastructural costs, including the library budget. From which subscriptions are paid.

Formal publication is part and parcel of research, and thus the cost of publication is part and parcel of the cost of research. Any kind of formal publishing 'eats away' a portion of scarce research funds. But unpublished research is pretty much regarded as research not done, so money on publication is generally well-spent.

Compare:

-OA publishing, with an aggregate cost to the scientific establishment of X per article published (total per article: X);

-OA via self-archiving of non-OA articles, with an aggregate cost to the scientific establishment of all the subscriptions taken (necessary in a self-archiving model), amounting to X per article published, plus the aggregate cost of thousands of institutional repositories and the staffing to keep them going, amounting to Y per article (total per article: X+Y).

Which is the greatest drain on scarce research funds?

Stevan doesn’t really respond to this, but he says:

“… until and unless subscription money is no longer paying for non-OA publishing (as it is now), and can be redirected to paying for OA publishing (Gold OA), there is no payment issue in connection with OA self-archiving mandates (Green OA): The publications that are being self-archived today have been paid for. This remains true until and unless OA self-archiving ever actually does cause cancellations and makes subscriptions unsustainable. Till then, it's Green OA and nothing more to pay.”

Sounds a bit like if your parachute fails, don’t worry about it until you hit the ground. Till then, you’re alive and well. Exquisitely logical. Yet some of us would rather like to try and pull a couple of cords here and there to see if we can manage to make a soft landing after all.

Now, a challenge to Stevan Harnad cum suis. Would he be campaigning for a mandate imposed by funders, that institutions, when paying for published research literature out of any budgets that benefit from overheads taken from research grants, pay only for article charges for OA and not for subscriptions anymore?

Mandates are of course last-resort measures and my liberal inclinations would prefer persuasion over mandates any time. But should mandates really be the only possibility, the advantages of this mandate would be clear, and these are just some of them: structural open access, no 'double' payment, only e few tens of thousands of institutions to deal with instead of millions of researchers, no need for self-archiving mandates, no multiple-version publishing.

Jan Velterop

* ‘Furthermore I am of the opinion’, from Cato the Elder, who famously ended every speech with “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” – “Furthermore I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed.”