("Re: RCUK fails to end ‘green’ embargo confusion" THE 14 March 2013)

What a mess! With publishers eagerly pawing at the Golden Door, and RCUK hopelessly waffling at Green embargo limits and their enforcement.

But relief is on the way! HEFCE has meanwhile quietly and gently proposed a solution that will moot all this relentless cupidity and stupidity.

HEFCE has proposed to mandate that in order to be eligible for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the final, peer-reviewed drafts of all papers published as of 2014 will have to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon publication: no delays, no embargoes, no exceptions -- irrespective of whether the paper is published in a Gold OA journal or a subscription journal, and irrespective of the allowable length of the embargo on making the deposit OA: The deposit itself must be immediate.

This has the immense benefit that while the haggling continues about how much will be paid for Gold OA and how long Green OA may be embargoed, all papers will be faithfully deposited -- and deposited in institutional repositories, which means that all UK universities will thereby be recruited, as of 2014, to monitor and ensure that the deposits are made, and made immediately. (Institutions have an excellent track record for making sure that everything necessary for REF is done, and done reliably, because a lot of money and prestige is at stake for them.)

And one of the ingenious features of the proposed HEFCE/REF Green OA mandate is the stipulation that deposit may not be delayed: Authors cannot wait till just before the next REF, six years later, to do it. If the deposit was not immediate, the paper is ineligible for REF.

And, most brilliant stroke of all, this ensures that it is not just the 4 papers that are ultimately chosen for submission to REF that are deposited immediately -- for that choice is always a retrospective one, made after looking over the past 6 years' work, to pick the four best papers. Rarely will this be known in advance. So the safest policy will be to deposit all papers immediately, just in case.

This is precisely the compliance assurance mechanism the RCUK mandate so desperately needs in order to succeed, but the RCUK policy-makers have not yet had the wit to conceive and adopt. Well, HEFCE/REF have done it for them, bless them.

But immediate-deposit is not immediate-OA you say? Indeed it is not. It does, however, overcome OA's most formidable hurdle, which is getting all those papers into the institutional repositories, and right away: keystrokes. It is just those keystrokes that have stood between the research world and OA for over over two decades now.

Once the institutional repositories are reliably being filled to 100%, does anyone with the slightest imagination doubt what will follow, as nature (and human nature) takes its course?

First, the repositories will facilitate sending reprints to those who request a single copy for research purposes, with one click each. Sending reprints is not OA; researchers have been doing it for a half century. But they used to have to do it by reading Current Contents or scanning journals' contents lists, mailing reprint requests, and then waiting and hoping that authors would take the time and trouble and expense to mail them a reprint, as requested (and many did). But now the whole transaction is just one click each, and almost immediate, if the papers have been deposited and both parties are at the wheel.

But that's still just Almost-OA. Once immediate-deposit is mandated, however, about 60% of those deposits can be made immediately OA, because about 60% of journals already endorse immediate, unembargoed Green OA. (RCUK has already succeeded is dragging down that figure to somewhat closer to 50/50 with its perverse preference for Gold, inspiring hybrid Gold publishers to offer Gold and increase Green embargo lengths to try to force UK authors to pick paid Gold over cost-free Green).

Now that's about half immediate-OA plus half Almost-OA to tide over researcher needs during the embargo. But does anyone have any doubt about what will happen next? As OA and Almost-OA grow, and the research community tastes more and more of what it's like to have half immediate-OA and half Almost-OA, all the disciplines that have not yet had the sense to do it will begin to do what almost 100% of physicists have already been doing for 20 years now without so much as a moment's hesitation or a "by your leave":

That last remaining keystroke, once a paper is written, revised, accepted and deposited -- the keystroke that makes the paper OA -- will be done sooner and sooner, more and more, until the embargoes with which publishers are trying to hold research hostage will all die their natural and well-deserved deaths as the research community learns to do the obvious, optimal and inevitable, in the online era.

(Nor will peer-reviewed journal publishing die, as publishers keep warning menacingly: It will simply convert to Gold OA -- but only after the pressure from Green OA has forced journals to phase out all obsolete products and services and their costs: that means phasing out the print version and the online version, and offloading all access-providing and archiving onto the global network of Green OA institutional repositories. Then, instead of double-paying for Gold OA, as Finch folly and RCUK recklessness would have us do -- subscriptions plus Gold OA fees -- post-Green Gold OA will just be a fee for the peer review service, at a fair, affordable and sustainable price, paid for out of a fraction of institutions' annual savings from subscription cancellations instead of out of scarce research funds, over and above subscriptions, as now. Pre-Green Gold is Fool's Gold: Post-Green Gold is Fair Gold.)

Executive Summary: The proposed HEFCE/REF Open Access [OA] mandate -- that in order to be eligible for REF, the peer-reviewed final draft of all journal articles must be deposited in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon publication, with embargoes applicable only to the date at which the article must be made OA – is excellent, and provides exactly the sort of complement required by the RCUK OA mandate. It ensures that authors deposit immediately and institutionally and it recruits their institutions to monitor and ensure compliance.
      For journal articles, no individual or disciplinary exceptions or exemptions to the immediate-deposit are needed, but embargo length can be adapted to the discipline or even to exceptional individual cases.
      Embargo length is even more important for open data, and should be carefully and flexibly adapted to the needs not only of disciplines and individuals, but of each individual research project.
      Requiring monograph OA if the author does not wish to provide it is not reasonable, but perhaps many or most monograph authors would not mind depositing their texts as Closed Access.

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we propose to accept material published via either gold or green routes as eligible, recognising that it is not appropriate to express any preference in the context of research assessment

Excellent. This is the optimal OA policy and is completely compatible with the OA policies being adopted worldwide. Note, though, that gold and green are not both “publishing routes.” They are both routes to providing OA, but only gold is a publishing route. The green route is to publish in any journal at all, and to provide OA to that publication by depositing it in an OA repository. So for clearer wording I would suggest: we propose to accept as eligible published material that has been made Open Access via either gold or green routes, recognising that it is not appropriate to express any preference in the context of research assessment. It is already implicit in the proposed HEFCE/REF OA policy, but suggest that it is make explicit that (the final peer-reviewed draft of) articles must be deposited in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon publication, irrespective of whether the author chooses the gold or the green route.

We propose to treat as ‘open access’ publications those which meet all of the following criteria:

deposited in the author's own institutional immediately upon publication,

although the repository may provide access in a way that respects agreed embargos

made available as the final peer reviewed text, though not necessarily identical to the publisher’s edited and formatted version;

and presented in a form allowing the reader to search for and re-use content (including by download and for text-mining) both manually and using automated tools, provided such re-use is subject to proper attribution under appropriate licensing

Excellent. I suggest that it be made clear that the re-use might only be after any allowable publisher embargo has elapsed. (I also suggest specifying that the re-use rights may exclude re-publication rights by rival free-riding publishers, otherwise this condition may induce publishers that have no embargo to adopt an embargo.)

We intend that work which has been originally published in an ineligible form then retrospectively made available in time for the post-2014 REF submission date should not be eligible, as the primary objective of this proposal is to stimulate immediate open-access publication.

Excellent. This is precisely the condition that is needed to ensure that deposit is immediate and not delayed, and to ensure that the authors’ institutions are recruited to monitor and ensure that deposit is immediate and not delayed. It is especially useful because its effects go far beyond the 4 papers that authors will ultimately submit to REF: The choice of the 4 papers to submit is not usually made until the end of the REF interval, just before the next REF. So, in the meanwhile, this policy makes it necessary that all potentially eligible papers are deposited immediately upon publication, whether or not they are ultimately submitted. This will go a long way toward ensuring that all UK research output is deposited immediately. (Special congratulations to HEFCE/REF for this especially effective clause!)

The role of institutional repositoriesAs part of our commitment to increasing public access, we intend to require that outputs meeting the REF open access requirement (whether published by the gold or green route) shall be accessible through an institutional repository.

Excellent. But one small suggestion: …(whether made open access by the gold or green route)… As earlier, this is to distinguish publishing from access-provision. ‘All submitted outputs covered by our requirement for open access above, and other submitted outputs that are available electronically, shall be available through a repository of the submitting institution.’

This would mean in practice that each submitting institution would maintain a web facility through which all relevant outputs might be identified and accessed (including items available through a link to another website).

Excellent. Exactly the policy needed. And of course just about all UK institutions already have these repositories. What they lacked was a mandate that would fill them, and empower them to ensure that they are filled. This is precisely what the HEFCE/REF OA policy provides – for the UK, and as a model for the rest of the world.

We welcome further advice on repository use and on techniques for institutional repositories to cross-refer to subject and other repositories.

Institutional repositories need to be OAI-compliant and interoperable, so that subject and other repositories can harvest their metadata for central cross-repository search.

Institutional repositories should also implement the SWORD protocol for importing/exporting contents to/from institutional and central repositories, such as Arxiv, UKPMC or EuroPMC. Repositories should also configure their data to make them maximally visible, discoverable, harvestable and hence searchable through Google Scholar and other major search engines. (I don’t think the function you mean here is to “cross-refer”: it’s interoperability, harvestability, importability, exportability, and rich metadata. As the repositories begin filling in a serious way, these functionalities will be developed and made even more powerful than is currently envisioned.)

Embargoes and licences

Some publishers introduce embargo periods before work can be made available in an open-access form. Where embargoes apply we propose to determine eligible periods with regard to the practice of other major research funders at the time. Outputs will be eligible if they are still under an acceptable embargo at the REF submission date

Exactly the right strategy: Separate deposit mandate (immediate, no exceptions) from the date at which the deposit must be made OA (allowable embargo length to be decided discipline by discipline).

While we expect that sufficient clarity and reassurance on embargoes and licences will be achieved through the Research Council discussions, we welcome responses which address these issues.

The crucial thing is to separate the immediate-deposit requirement from the question of embargo length or nature of license.

Exceptions

Ideally we would like to see all outputs that are submitted for research assessment published in a form which meet the criteria. However, we recognise that there may be some exceptions during this transitional period.

We have considered three possible ways of handling exceptions:

a. Identifying categories of material which we think may be exempt from the open access requirement described above (paragraph 11). We would give careful consideration to reasoned suggestions for sub-categories of material that should be exempt.

b. Allowing individual outputs to be exempt from the requirement on a case-by-case basis, based on guidelines.

c. Specifying that a given percentage (for example, 80 per cent) of all outputs submitted by an institution meet the requirement.

Books and data can be handled differently from journal articles, because the case for (and timing of) OA for books and for data is very different. But on no account should any exceptions be allowed for the immediate-deposit requirement for journal articles. Special treatment or exceptions should only pertain to the embargo length (i.e., the date at which the deposit is made OA). And on no account should the immediate-deposit requirement be applied only on a percentage basis. Immediate-deposit should be 100%. Embargo-lengths and rights/licenses can be adapted to disciplines or special individual cases.

Some have asked that particular disciplinary groups should be exempt from this requirement, but we consider that research in all subjects has equal importance and therefore equally merits receiving the benefits of open-access publication. As with other aspects of the REF we expect the details relating to exemptions to be sympathetic to particular disciplinary issues; but in this instance we consider it will be most appropriate to identify which types of output should be exempt, looking across all disciplines, and we welcome advice on this.

Again, exemptions and exceptions based on disciplines should only be considered for OA embargo length and for further rights licensing, over and above free online access (and of course for books, data, and other special content other than journal articles). But not for journal article deposit date, which must be immediate.

Taking account of publication timescales and that the start of the next REF period is 1st January 2014, it may be that some notice is needed before these requirements apply. We propose to set a date which provides reasonable notice. Outputs published before that date will be automatically exempt from these requirements. We welcome advice on an appropriate notice period, taking account of the publications cycle.

If the HEFCE/REF mandate is adopted soon, there is no reason at all why 1 January 2014 cannot be the start-date for the immediate-deposit requirement (for journal articles).

(If a researcher’s institution does not yet have a repository, there is OpenDepot, created precisely for that purpose – and still patiently awaiting mandates in order to put its resources to use!)

Monograph publications

No pressing issues with books: No harm would be done if monographs too had to be deposited immediately, but with no requirement to make them open access – neither immediately, nor ever, unless the author wishes.

(As green OA for articles grows, more and more monograph authors will want the benefits of OA too, in terms of increased usage and impact.)

Open data

We invite comment on whether respondents feel this is the appropriate approach or whether they feel that sufficient progress has in fact been made to implement a requirement for open data as well. We will consider any representations that such a requirement may reasonably now be developed but would also need advice on how this might be achieved.

There are special complications with data that do not exist at all for journal articles (or even for books): Researchers are researchers, not mere data-gatherers. They gather data in order to use, data-mine and analyze it. If they are forced to make their data OA for use by one and all immediately, then there is a “Prisoner’s Dilemma”: It’s much better for me if I don’t take the time or trouble (nor spend the time seeking the funding) to gather the data myself: Just let someone else do the work, and then I can help myself to the data immediately, because it is mandated! In other words, embargoes are a much more serious matter in the case of data than in the case of journal articles.

Journal article embargoes are merely ways of allowing publishers to ensure their current revenue streams and modus operandi instead of letting research and researchers derive the full benefits of the web era. (It is not clear that that is good for anyone but the publishers). But with research data not only is the existence and length of an exclusive “1st-expoitation right” for the data-gatherer fair and important, but the length of the fair “embargo period” will vary substantially from project to project, not just from discipline to discipline.

1. Green/Subscription Co-Existence. Subscriptions might co-exist peacefully with Green OA for some time, even after the world has reached 100% Green.

(As long as mandatory Green OA generates 100% Green OA, this is no problem for OA, and it certainly does ease the hardship of the serials crisis, since with 100% Green, subscriptions become a luxury rather than a painful necessity, as they are now.)

2. The Green/Gold Distinction.The definition of Green and Gold OA is that Green OA is provided by the author and Gold OA is provided by the journal. This makes no reference to journal cost-recovery model. Although most of the top Gold OA journals charge APCs and are not subscription based, the majority of Gold OA journals do not charge APCs (as Peter Suber and others frequently point out).

These Gold OA journals may cover their costs in one of several ways:

(i) Gold OA journals may simply be subscription journals that make their online version OA
(ii) Gold OA journals may be subsidized journals
(iii) Gold OA journals may be volunteer journals where all parties contribute their resources and services gratis
(iv) Gold OA journals may be hybrid subscription/Gold journals that continue to charge subscriptions for non-OA articles but offer the Gold option for an APC by the individual OA article.

All of these are Gold OA (or hybrid) journals.

It would perhaps be feasible to estimate the costs of each kind. But I think it would be a big mistake, and a source of great confusion, if one of these kinds (say, ii, or iii) were dubbed "Platinum."

That would either mean that it was both Gold and Platinum, or it would restrict the meaning of Gold to (i) and (iv), which would redefine terms in wide use for almost a decade now in terms of publication economics rather than in terms of the way they provide OA, as they had been.

(And in that case we would need many more "colours," one for each of (i) - (iv) and any other future cost-recovery model someone proposes (advertising?) -- and then perhaps also different colors for Green (institutional repository deposit, central deposit, home-page deposit, immediate deposit, delayed deposit, OAI-compliant, author-deposited, librarian-deposited, provost-deposited, 3rd-party-deposited, crowd-sourced, e.g. via Mendeley, which some have proposed calling this "Titanium OA").

I don't think this particoloured nomenclature would serve any purpose other than confusion. Green and Gold designate the means by which the OA is provided -- by the author or by the journal. The journal's cost-recovery model is another matter, and should not be colour-coded lest it obscure this fundamental distinction. Ditto for the deposit's locus and manner.

3. "Overlay Journals." I have a longstanding problem with the term "overlay journal" that I have rehearsed before. Overlay of what on what?

The notion of an "overlay journal" was first floated by Ginsparg for Arxiv. Arxiv contains authors' unrefereed, unpublished preprints and then their refereed, published postprints. Ginsparg said that eventually journals could turn into "overlays" on the Arxiv deposits, corresponding roughly to the transition from preprint to postprint. The "overlay" would consist of the peer review, revision, and then the journal title as the "tag" certifying the officially accepted version.

But in that sense, all Gold OA journals are "overlay journals" once they have phased out their print edition:

The "overlay" of the peer review service and then the tagging of the officially accepted version could be over a central repository, over distributed institutional repositories, or over the publsher's (OA) website.

Even a non-OA subscription journal would be an "overlay" journal if it had phased out its print edition: The peer review and certification tag would simply be an "overlay" on an online version, regardless of where it was located, and even regardless of whether it was OA or non-OA. (Once we get this far, we see that even for print journals the peer review and certification is just an "overlay").

What I think this reveals is that in the online era (and especially the OA era) the notion of "overlay" is completely redundant: Once we note that the print edition was just a technical detail of the Gutenberg era, we realize that journal publishing consists (and always implicitly consisted) of two components: access-provision and quality-control/certification (peer-review/editing). The latter is always an "overlay" on the former. And once the print edition is gone, it's an overlay on a digital template that can be here, there or everywhere. It is simply a tagged digital file.

Now my own oft-repeated scenario is that universally mandated Green OA self-archiving will eventually lead to journals abandoning their print versions, then abandoning their digital versions and offloading all access-provision and archiving of the digital version onto the global network of Green OA repositories.

This is, in a sense, an "overlay" scenario. But a much simpler and more natural way of looking at it is that from the multiple functions that journals formerly performed, and the multiple co-bundled products and services they formerly sold via subscription -- print edition, online edition, distribution, storage and peer review/editing -- Green OA will induce a down-sizing to the sole remaining essential function for a peer-reviewed journal in the networked online medium: peer review.

Peer review is hence an unbundled service provided by a post-Green Gold OA journal. I don't think it is realistic to try to assess its costs independently, as a form of journal publication "overlaid" on something or other -- independent of what that something or other is, and how it gets there!

So although it is likely that 100% Green will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable and force a transition to Gold, there may be a long co-existence interregnum in between. (And the main unpredicatable factor determining that will be author/reader habits, including how long they will want to keep paying for print, and how much and how long they value the publisher's version-of-record.)

That's why it is far less important how long 100% Green will co-exist with subscriptions than how long it will take to get to 100% Green (and what's the fastest and surest way to get us there?)!

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Berners-Lee, Tim, De Roure, Dave, Harnad, Stevan and Shadbolt, Nigel (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

There is a profound latent conflation and incoherence in the question "What is the business model to support open access through institutional repositories?"

It is a conflation between the business model for publishing and the "business" model for institutional repositories (IRs).

The conflation is also evident in any mention (in the context of IR costs) of peer review costs or of revival university presses linked to repositories.

1. Green OA self-archiving is not a substitute for peer-reviewed subscription journal publishing: it is a supplement to it, for the purpose of providing access to all users, rather than just to subscribers.

2. The function (and cost) of (the editorial management of) journal peer review is neither an institutional repository function (and cost) nor a university function (or cost).

3. Institutional repositories provide access (only) to their own research output.

4. Hence the notion of their doing their own peer review would amounts to a vanity press (self-publication).

5. Alternatively, if a university press produces a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research from other institutions, then that's just another Gold OA journal, not an IR function or cost.

Please let us not be drawn into the fuzzy notions of certain critics of OA or of Green OA IRs, with hazy, incoherent questions about "business models" that naively conflate IR functions with publishing functions.

IRs are created for many different purposes (some sensible, some not), Green OA being only one of those purposes. (Elaborate local IR search is a foolish function, for example; search will always take place at the multi-IR harvester level. Digital preservation is also not a straightforward function for institutional journal article output, at least not yet: Green OA IRs archive authors' final drafts, for access-supplemental purposes: that is not the draft that requires the preservation: the publisher's version of record is!)

IRs also store all sorts of other institutional objects, data and records. Those functions and their costs have nothing to do with OA and it is absurd for OA policy-makers to ask for a Green IR "business model" that includes those costs and functions.

Yet the IR start-up and maintenance costs (small though they are) are already covered in large part by the institutional sectors that require those non-OA IR functions. (I say "in large part" because without effective Green OA mandates, the Green OA content and function of IRs is minimal.)

Houghton & Swan's (2013) cost/benefit analyses stress that Green OA is a transitional strategy: It supplements subscription publishing and its costs by providing OA.

Houghton & Swan also have cost/benefit estimates for pure Gold OA publication, once subscriptions are gone.

But the question of "IR business model" cuts across these two, incoherently, as if they were both happening at the same time, which makes no sense whatsoever.

I have a more specific hypothesis about how this Green to Gold transition is likely to take place. At the very least, this hypothetical scenario has the virtue of keeping the respective expenses and "business models" in their proper places in the likely temporal sequence, rather than conflating them incoherently, in parallel:

I. Subscriptions prevail, as now.

II. Green OA is universally mandated, by institutions and funders.

III. Green OA grows (anarchically, article by article, not systematically, journal by journal).

IV. So subscriptions continue to co-exist with Green OA, as Green OA grows, because journals cannot be cancelled by institutions until all or most of their contents are available to their users by another means (Green OA).

V. Once there is enough Green OA to make subscription cancellations significant (or even earlier), journals will have to prepare for the transition, by phasing out obsolete products and services, and their costs:

VI. The print edition and its costs will be phased out first. Then, once subscriptions approach unsustainability, the online edition (and its costs) will be phased out, and both access-provision and archiving (and their costs) will be offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA IRs.

VII. But the costs of access-provision and archiving will already be distributed across the worldwide network of Green OA IRs: the only difference will be that the Green OA final refereed draft will become the version of record.

VIII. Publishers' only remaining cost will be the editorial management of peer review.

IX. To cover this last remaining cost, publishers will convert to Gold OA, and institutions will pay for it, per outgoing article, out of a fraction of their subscription cancelation savings.

X. But publishing (peer review) and its costs will remain autonomous from the distributed IR access-provision and archiving and its costs.

Hence the pre-emptive call for a Green IR "business model" at this time is both unrealistic and incoherent, showing a lack of understanding (or a simplistic misunderstanding) if what is really going on.

"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world... At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]
Houghton & Swan (2013)

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold” D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

RCUK has now made it clear that authors are free to choose Green or Gold.

That means authors no longer have to switch journals or pay for Gold if they do not wish to.

But RCUK has done nothing to implement a compliance monitoring and verification mechanism for Green: Quite the opposite. RCUK has simply turned the entire Green option into an unmonitored, unverified, open-ended delay of 24 months or more. (The only compliance monitoring proposed so far concerns how institutions spend the Gold funds!)

But the proposed new HEFCE/REF mandate has offered the remedy:

To be eligible for REF, all articles need to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication (regardless of whether the journal is subscription or Gold, and regardless of whether the deposit is embargoed or unembargoed).

This (by recruiting UK institutions in monitoring and ensuring immediate deposit) will repair the glaring gap in the RCUK mandate.

And with the help of the institutional repositories' faciltated "request copy" Button, immediate-deposit will also tide over researcher access needs during any embargo as delayed deposit could not have done.

The only remaining perverse effect of the RCUK mandate is the obvious incentive it gives to subscription publishers (including those publishers who currently endorse immediate, unembargoed Green OA) to instead offer hybrid Gold and adopt and extend a Green OA embargo beyond the RCUK limit to increase the pressure on UK authors to pick and pay for the hybrid Gold option.

But since the RCUK is not even bothering to monitor author compliance with its increasingly open-ended embargo limits, if the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit mandate is adopted, this potential perverse effect of the RCUK mandate is somewhat reduced (though still not zero). Yet perhaps the reduced uptake of the UK Gold option, now that it is clarified that authors are free to choose -- along with the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit requirement irrespective of Gold or embargoes -- will make the damage from the RCUK policy on international Green OA mandates negligible.