Re: The UK report, press coverage, and the Green and Gold Roads toOpen Access

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Jan Velterop wrote:

>     Stevan Harnad wrote: The press just keeps on missing the mark!
> 
> The mark is Open Access... The press is not missing that mark...
> Which tactical or strategic method is being used to get to Open Access
> is perhaps a secondary mark, not of interest to the press. 

The mark is Open Access (OA). How we get to that mark is of primary
importance, whether or not of secondary interest to the press. When the
press misses or misrepresents the historically important recommendations
of the recent UK (and US) Committees, they miss and misrepresent how and
why it is recommended that we get where. To miss that is to miss the mark,
primary, secondary, or otherwise.

To be more specific: When the specific recommendation of both UK and US
Committees is to mandate OA self-archiving of authors' published journal
articles, it is a misrepresentation to call that a recommendation to
publish in OA journals, or a recommendation for OA publishing.

The correct summary of the UK recommendations is this:

    (UK-1) Mandate author-institution OA self-archiving of all UK-funded
    research output (and fund and support the practise, as needed)

    (UK-2) Fund author-institution costs of publishing in OA journals

    (UK-3) Fund and support further experimentation with the OA journal
    publishing cost-recovery model
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm

The correct summary of the US recommendation is this:

    (US-1) Mandate author OA self-archiving of all NIH-funded research
    output.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=o31

The reason it matters what the press reports is that press reports
influence what the public learns and understands and does about OA. The
public includes the tax-payers who are meant to be behind this mandate
and, even more important, the university administrators and grant-funding
officers who are meant to implement it, and, more important still, the
researchers who are meant to comply with it.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

Dwelling instead -- irrelevantly and misleadingly -- on what the reports
did *not* recommend mandating -- namely OA publishing -- not only fails to
convey what they actually did recommend, but it propagates and prolongs
the prevailing and persisting misunderstanding about OA and how to reach
it that has so long delayed OA itself.

OA is the target, and that target will not be reached by waiting for OA
publishing (gold). It will be reached, immediately, by OA self-archiving
(green), which is what both reports recommended mandating. Implementing
that mandate depends on authors, their universities, and their funders,
not on publishers or publishing.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif

If journal publishers are to be pressured to do anything at all, it is to
go green, not gold -- i.e., to give their official green light to
author-institution self-archiving, as they have already done for 84% of
their journals: http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Mandated self-archiving
will help raise that green percentage to 100%:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif

> The target is Open Access, whichever arrows we use, even if the press is
> confused about the colour of the arrows' vanes. What's important is that
> they do not lose sight of the target. 

It's not about color confusion, it's about concept-confusion,
strategy-confusion, target-confusion -- and the failure to convey the
essence of both recommendations. OA is the end, and mandated
self-archiving is the means. That's what needs to be understood by
journalists, and that is the understanding that needs to be conveyed to
their readers. *Then* the opinions can be solicited, and that chat-show
panorama so favoured by today's journalists and readers can be duly
purveyed.

But first get the facts straight.

Stevan Harnad