LOGOS Gold Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving

Stevan Harnad Introduction Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the fi nal, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon ac- ceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if Born in Hungary, did his under- universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions graduate work at McGill University and his gradu- unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively ate work at Princeton University. Currently Harnad today, without fi rst having mandated green OA is Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the University Southampton, UK, and Canada Research attainment of universal OA. Chair in at Université du Québec à Montréal. He was founder and editor of CUP’s Be- Open Access (OA) means free online access. What havioral and Brain Sciences journal, past president of made Open Access possible was the advent of the the Society for and , external networked online medium: the Internet, and even- member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and tually the Web, empowered the authors of digital author and contributor to over 300 publications. works to give them away free for all online if they Harnad’s research interests are in Open Access Sci- wished. entometrics, Category Learning, Symbol Grounding The term “Open Access” was fi rst coined by the and Language Origins. One of the most devoted and Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI),1 spon- outspoken supporters of Open Access to research, sored by the Open Society Institute (OSI)2 in 2001. Harnad spends a considerable amount of time advo- But the idea of providing free online access – and cating Open Access to scholarship worldwide. the provision of free online access – started much earlier than the BOAI and the adoption of the E-mail: [email protected] name “OA.” The inventors of Unix3 and the In- ternet4 – mostly computer scientists – had already Websites: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/harnad been providing OA to their research papers by http://openaccess.eprints.org self-archiving them in “anonymous FTP archives”5 since at least the 1970s. With the invention of the Web 6 in 1990, websites soon became the preferred way of self-archiving papers. High energy physi- cists – who had already been systematically shar- ing their works on paper before the Internet, and DOI: 10.1163/095796511X559972 then via email when it became possible – began

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self-archiving them in Arxiv,7 a centralized physics science are cited signifi cantly more than non-OA web archive, in 1991. Many individuals from many articles.17 Many subsequent follow-up studies18 con- other disciplines have since followed the lead of fi rmed that this “OA impact advantage” was also the computer scientists and the physicists. present in every other scholarly and scientifi c fi eld tested. But even the OA advantage was not suf- The “Subversive Proposal” to Self-Archive fi cient to induce the 85% of non-self-archiving au- Refereed Journal Articles thors to do so. A “Subversive Proposal”8 to make all refereed journal articles free for all by self-archiving them Mandating Self-Archiving online was posted in 1994. The proposal also iden- It had already been proposed since 1998 in the tifi ed the way to cover the cost of publication if American Scientist Open Access Forum19 that uni- OA self-archiving eventually made subscriptions versities and research funders should mandate OA unsustainable: fees for publishing individual arti- self-archiving (i.e., make it a requirement, as a cles instead of subscription fees for accessing them. natural extension of the requirement to publish-or- The fi rst OA journals began appearing in 1989;9 perish).20 The School of Electronics and Computer most were either the online versions of subscrip- Science at Southampton University (UK) was the tion journals or they were subsidised online-only fi rst in the world to adopt an OA self-archiving journals. mandate, in 2002.21 The fi rst university-wide OA Meanwhile, the 1994 Subversive Proposal to mandate was then adopted by Queensland Univer- self-archive went largely unheeded: For the follow- sity of Technology (Australia)22 and the fi rst Eu- ing decade, the rate of author self-archiving con- ropean university-wide mandate by University of tinued to hover at about 15-20 percent10 of yearly Minho (Portugal),23 both in 2004. refereed research output. The proportion of arti- cles published in OA journals was even lower.11 Providing centralized archives like Arxiv for other In 2001, Steve Lawrence disciplines (e.g., CogPrints12 for the Cognitive Sci- published a paper in ences) likewise failed to increase the rate of OA self-archiving. Nature reporting that In 1999, the (OAI)13 OA articles in computer developed a metadata-tagging protocol in order to make all Open Archives “interoperable,” which science are cited means that depositing locally in any individual signifi cantly more than archive became equivalent to depositing centrally in one global, seamlessly searchable Open Archive. non-OA articles. In 2000, free software (EPrints)14 was designed at the University of Southampton (by adapting the Likewise in 2004, the UK Parliamentary Se- CogPrints software to make it OAI-compliant and lect Committee on Science and Technology rec- generic) to make it possible for all universities to ommended that universities and research funders create their own OAI-compliant Open Archives should mandate OA.24 In the same year, the US (which soon came to be called, instead, “Institu- House Appropriations Committee, too, recom- tional Repositories” [IRs]).15 Many IRs were subse- mended that NIH should mandate OA.25 The UK quently created, worldwide – their growth has been government failed to act on the Committee’s rec- monitored by the University of Southampton’s ommendation, yet within a few years all seven of Registery of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)16 the UK Research Councils nevertheless followed since 2001 – but IRs remained near-empty because it, each adopting a self-archiving mandate of its 85% of researchers still were not self-archiving. own.26 The Wellcome Trust became the fi rst re- In 2001, Steve Lawrence published a paper in search funder to mandate OA in 2005.27 In the Nature reporting that OA articles in computer same year, NIH adopted an OA request instead of a

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