Open Access Week: Series of reports on OA

Thu Oct 23 10:20:43 EDT 2014

The EC-commisioned Science-Metrix study
<http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/proportion-of-open-access-papers-published-in-peer-reviewed-journals-at-the>
has
a lot of interesting and useful information that I hope the EC will apply
and use.

*Access Timing.* The fundamental problem highlighted by the Science-Metrix
findings is *timing*: Over 50% of all articles published since 2007 are
freely available today. But the trouble is that their percentage in the
most critical years, namely, *the 1-2 years following publication*, is far
lower than that! This is partly because of publisher OA embargoes, partly
because of author fears and sluggishness, but mostly because not enough strong,
effective OA mandates
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1132-Estimating-Open-Access-Mandate-Effectiveness-I.-The-MELIBEA-Score.html>
have
as yet been adopted by institutions and funders. I hope the Science-Metrix
study will serve to motivate and accelerate the adoption of strong,
effective OA mandates worldwide. That will narrow the gap at the
all-important growth tip of research, which is its first 1-2 years.

A few things to bear in mind:

*1. Delayed Access. *Publishers have essentially resigned themselves to Delayed
Access <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1084-.html> —
i.e., free online access 1-2 years after publication. They know they can’t
stop it, and they know it doesn’t have a significant effect on subscription
revenues. Hence the real battle-ground for OA is the growth region of
research: the 1-2 years following publication. That’s why OA mandates are
so important.

*2. Embargoes.* Most OA mandates allow an OA embargo during the first year
folllowing publication. But there are ways that immediate research needs
can be fulfilled even during an OA embargo, namely, via institutional
repositories’ semi-automatic copy-request Button <http://j.mp/CopyReqButton>.
For this Button to fulfill its purposes, however, OA mandates must require
deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication, not just after a
6-12-month OA embargo has elapsed. There are still too few such
immediate-deposit mandates, but the Science-Metrix study would have missed
the "almost-OA" access that they provide unless it also measured
Button-based copy-provision.

*3. Green OA, Gold OA and Non-OA.* It is incorrect that "Green OA" means
only repository-based OA. Of course OA (free online access) provided on
authors' websites is Green OA too. The best way to define Green OA is OA
provided by other than the publisher: Gold OA is provided by the publisher
(though often paid for by the author or the author's institution or
funder). Green OA is provided by the author, wherever the author provides
the free online access. (And, although it is not the kind of OA advocated
or mandated by institutions and funders, 3rd-party "bootleg" OA, apart from
being hard to ascertain, is also Green OA: it certainly doesn't merit a
color of its own -- and probably a lot of the back access is
3rd-party-provided rather than author-provided.) So the Science-Metrix data
would be more informative and easier to interpret if it were all clearly
classified as either Green OA, Gold OA, or non-OA. That would give a
clearer idea of the relative size and growth rate of the two roads to OA.

*4. The OA Impact Advantage.* I am sure that Gold OA would show the same OA
impact advantage as Green OA if it were equally possible to measure it. The
trouble is determining the non-OA baseline for comparison. Green OA impact
studies <http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636> can do this
easily, by comparing OA and non-OA articles published in the same journal
issue and year; Gold OA impact studies have the problem of equating OA and
non-OA journals for content and quality. And although there are junk
journals among both non-OA and Gold OA journals, it is undeniable that
their proportions are higher among Gold OA journals (see Beall's list)
whereas the proportion of Gold OA journals themselves is still low. So
their impact estimates would be dragged down by the junk-Gold journals.

*5. From Fools Gold to Fair Gold.* The Science-Metrix study is right that
toll-access publishing will prove unsustainable in the long run. But it is
mandatory Green OA self-archiving that will drive the transition to Fair-Gold
OA <http://j.mp/FlsGold> sooner rather than later.

Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions
unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access
<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>
. *LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog* 4/28

Vincent-Lamarre, P., Boivin, J., Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., & Harnad, S.
(2014). Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score
<http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.2926>. arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.2926.

P.S. I learned from Richard van Noorden's posting
<http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/10/more-than-half-of-2007-2012-research-articles-now-free-to-read.html>
on
this that the Open Access Button <https://www.openaccessbutton.org/> --
which names and shames publishers for embargoing OA whenever a user
encounters a non-OA paper --  *can now also email an automatic request to
the author for a copy* (if it can find the author's email address). This
new capability complements the already existing copy-request Button
<http://j.mp/CopyReqButton> implemented in many institutional repositories,
which is reliably linked to the author's email address. The purpose of the
repositories' copy-request Button is to complement and reinforce
institutional and funder OA mandates <http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2926> that
require authors to deposit their final, refereed drafts immediately upon
acceptance for publication rather than only after a publisher OA embargo
has elapsed

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 10:12 AM, Éric Archambault <
eric.archambault at science-metrix.com> wrote:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> *Apologies for cross-posting*
>
>
>
> As part of Open Access Week 2014, a series of six reports on open access,
> produced for the European Commission (EC), were posted yesterday on the
> Science-Metrix website:
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports
>
>
>
> These reports were produced as part of the EC efforts to monitor the
> development of open access (OA) availability of peer-reviewed papers in
> addition to examining policies to promote OA data and scientific
> publications.
>
>
>
> The core report in the series provides definitions for OA scientific
> papers to address some of the shortcomings of existing definitions which
> are far too incomplete to grasp the full spectrum of situations encountered
> while measuring OA availability.
>
>
>
> The following definitions are suggested:
>
>
>
> *A: Access*—can be open (free), restricted or paid; with unrestricted or
> restricted usage rights; quality controlled or not; pre-print
> (pre-referring), post-print (post-referring), or published version (with
> final copy editing and page layout); immediate or delayed; permanent or
> transient.
>
>
>
> *OA: Open Access*—freely available online to all.
>
>
>
> *IOA: Ideal OA*—free; quality controlled (peer-reviewed or editorially
> controlled); with unrestricted usage rights (e.g. CC BY); in final,
> published form; immediate; permanent.
>
>
>
> *RA: Restricted Access*—access restricted to members of a group, club, or
> society.
>
>
>
> *PA: Paid Access*—access restricted by a pay wall; includes subscription
> access, licensed access, and pay-to-view access.
>
>
>
> *Restricted OA*—free but with download restrictions (e.g. registration
> required, restricted to manual download, HTML-only as opposed to
> self-contained format such as PDF) or re-use rights (e.g. CC NC).
>
>
>
> *Green OA*—OA provided before or immediately after publication by author
> self-archiving.
>
>
>
> *Gold OA*—immediate OA provided by a publisher, sometimes with paid for
> publication fee. Note that several Gold journals have right restriction:
> they are Gold ROA. For example, of the 38% of journals listed in the DOAJ
> that use a Creative Common licence, only 53% use the CC-BY licence that
> would allow them to qualify for the IOA definition above (Herb, 2014).
>
> *Gold OA Journal*—journal offering immediate cover-to-cover access.
>
> *Gold OA Article*—immediately accessible paper appearing in a Gold
> journal, or in a PA journal (the latter is also sometimes referred to as
> hybrid open access).
>
>
>
> *ROA: Robin Hood OA or Rogue OA*—Available for free in spite of
> restrictions, usage rights, or copyrights (overriding RA, PA, Restricted
> OA). As the publishers' copyright policies and self-archiving rules are
> compiled by the University of Nottingham in the SHERPA/RoMEO database,
> Rogue OA is synonymous with Robin Hood OA.
>
>
>
> *DOA: Delayed OA*—access after a delay period or embargo.
>
> *Delayed Green OA*—free online access provided by the author after a
> delay (due to author's own delay to make available for free) or embargo
> period (typically imposed by publisher).
>
> *Delayed Gold OA*—free online access provided by the publisher after a
> delay (e.g. change of policy that makes contents available for free) or
> embargo period.
>
> *Delayed Gold OA Journal*—Journal offering cover-to-cover access after an
> embargo period or after a delay.
>
> *Delayed Gold OA Article*—Paper appearing in a Gold journal or in a PA
> journal (the latter is also sometimes referred to as hybrid open access)
> which is available after an embargo period or after a delay.
>
>
>
> *TOA: Transient OA*—free online access during a certain time.
>
> *Transient Green OA*—free online access provided by the author for a
> certain time which then disappears. Note that a substantial part of Green
> OA could be Transient Green OA due to the unstable nature of the internet,
> websites, and institutional repositories, many of which are not updated or
> maintained after a period of time and are therefore susceptible to deletion
> in subsequent institutional website overhauls. There are also integrator
> repositories that can change access rules, for example after being acquired
> by a third party.
>
> *Transient Gold OA*—free but temporary online access provided by the
> publisher, instead of permanent. Sometimes appears as part of promotion.
> Note that some Gold journals and articles sometimes become paid access
> after a certain time, because of revised strategies by a publisher or
> because they are sold to another publisher who instaures paid access.
>
>
>
> Looking forward, we need to understand these various forms of OA
> availability. It was beyond the scope of this project to measure all these
> forms but it is an essential element to address. For example, Robin Hood OA
> has hardly been measured and is somewhat of a taboo subject. Transiency is
> another ill-understood subject that should be addressed by fundamental
> questions such as; What is the percentage of OA papers which are transient
> and why is this occurring?
>
>
>
> Relative to these definitions, the report has shortcomings. In the present
> reports, the following operational definitions were used to perform
> measurement:
>
>
>
> *Green OA*: refers to papers which are self-archived by authors and
> available on institutional repositories as listed in *Open*DOAR and/or in
> ROAR. Listings in *Open*DOAR and ROAR which correspond to known Gold OA
> Journals were set aside. Aggregator sites such as CiteSeerX were not
> considered here, since, even though they access article submissions, they
> do not constitute a repository in the classical sense. Likewise, articles
> in the main PubMed Central sites were not counted as Green as they have
> curtailed usage rights or limited download rights.[3]
> <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftn1> Because it is commonly difficult to determine
> whether a paper was self-archived before, at the same time or after
> publication and also how long it will be available on the internet, Green
> OA includes Green OA, Delayed Green and Transient Green. Note that some of
> these articles may not respect restrictions placed by journal publishers
> (many of whose rules can be found on SHERPA/ROMEO)[4]
> <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftn2> and therefore contain a certain number of Robin
> Hood OA papers. Finally, only articles which could be downloaded without
> user registrations were considered.
>
>
>
> *Gold Journals OA*: refers to papers appearing in journals listed in the
> Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)[5] <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftn3> and
> on the PubMed Central list of journals.[6] <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftn4> When
> a paper is published during the first year that a journal appears in the
> DOAJ, it is not counted. This is a conservative decision due to the fact
> that one cannot determine whether a journal started publishing Gold
> articles early or late during the year. For PubMed Central, only open
> access journals with full participation and immediate access were
> considered to be Gold, hence all journals with an embargo and in the 'NIH
> Portfolio' were not considered. Thus, this category covers articles
> appearing in Gold journals and excludes delayed Gold as well as piecemeal
> Gold (Gold articles in paid access journals, also called hybrid OA).
>
>
>
> *Other OA*: refers to pretty much everything that could be found on the
> web by a determined researcher and downloaded for free and which was not
> part of the Green and Gold operational definitions above. This comprises
> articles appearing in journals with an embargo period (Delayed Gold OA);
> articles appearing on authors' webpages and elsewhere (both Green OA and
> Rogue OA); articles appearing on aggregator sites such as ResearchGate and
> CiteSeerX in addition to PubMed Central. The category comprises both
> transiently and permanently accessible items as there are no reliable ways
> to ascertain at measurement time whether an item will be permanently
> accessible or not.
>
>
>
> *Total OA*: The mutually exclusive sum of Green OA, Gold Journal OA, and
> Other OA.
>
>
>
> These definitions, though they made sense from an operational
> point-of-view, are inadequate for the future. They were used in response to
> comments received on last year’s series of reports. They were a stopgap
> measure and reflected what could be done on the project’s budget and with
> the tools available. More detailed work is required, preferably on a large
> scale such as was done in this study (sample larger than 1 million randomly
> selected articles).
>
>
>
> An important aspect of the study which we hope will be followed by other
> metrology undertakings on OA availability is the use of: 1) large scale
> measurement to reduce statistical error; 2) use of calibration sample to
> determine adjustment by counting precisely recall and precision of the
> large scale measurement apparatus; 3) applying the calibration to the
> measured quantities. With hindsight, the application of the second part of
> the technique is a weak point of the study as the sample size was too small
> (500) and added an error of ± 4.5 percentage points. The manual calibration
> should be closer to 10,000 randomly selected papers to establish a gold
> standard to reduce additional error to about 1 percentage point (simplified
> discussion here, please see report D1.8 for a more elaborate discussion).
>
>
>
> Discussion of the source of data’s characteristics is also essential. We
> need to have a more in-depth understanding of OA availability per country.
> I strongly suspect that countries that are not covered by WoS and Scopus
> are more likely to have a greater propensity to diffuse knowledge openly
> (and more so for the former, which partly explains why measuring OA with
> WoS provides lower scores). Combining WoS with no calibration for recall
> and precision can lead to a very serious underestimation of OA availability
> (missing more than 40% of the actual count of all peer-reviewed papers). It
> is likely that this study also underestimates OA availability because of
> the inadequate non-English language scientific literature in Scopus.
>
>
>
> Another important contribution of the report is the examination of the
> scientific impact of OA vs. non-OA literature with three scores: 1)
> normalised impact of all literature (=1.0); 2) normalised impact of OA
> literature; 3) normalised impact of non-OA literature. Using a one-million
> article sample shows the deleterious effect, on average, of non-espousing
> an OA diffusion strategy. Data are also presented on broad fields of
> knowledge and show that green OA is king for impact yet even the younger
> (on average) gold journals are showing greater impact than the
> more-established (on average) subscription-based journals in several
> fields. Seriously designed studies are required to control for embargo to
> understand how DOA papers are disadvantaged in terms of scientific impact
> relative to immediate OA.
>
>
>
> These results are presented at length in the report which can be
> downloaded from here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/proportion-of-open-access-papers-published-in-peer-reviewed-journals-at-the
>
>
>
> A review of OA policies for scientific publication can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/state-of-art-analysis-of-oa-strategies-to-peer-review-publications
>
>
>
> A review of OA policies for scientific data can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/state-of-art-analysis-of-oa-strategies-to-scientific-data
>
>
>
> A comparative analysis of OA policies for scientific publications and data
> can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/comparative-analysis-of-the-strengths-and-weaknesses-of-existing-open-access
>
>
>
> A synthesis report on OA availability and policies can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/evolution-of-open-access-policies-and-availability-1996-2013-0
>
>
>
> Finally, the short version of this synthesis can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/summary-report-evolution-of-open-access-policies-and-availability-1996-2013
>
>
>
> Have a great Open Access Week and we hope you will appreciate these
> weekend readings.
>
>
>
> Yours sincerely
>
>
>
> Eric Archambault, Ph.D.
>
> President and CEO | Président-directeur général
>
> Science-Metrix
>
> Brussels | Montréal | Washington
>
> 1335, Mont-Royal E
>
> Montréal, QC  H2J 1Y6
>
> Canada
>
>
>
> T. 1.514.495.6505 x.111
>
> F. 1.514.495.6523
>
> E-mail: eric.archambault at science-metrix.com
>
> Web:    www.science-metrix.com
>
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> ------------------------------
>
> [3] <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftnref1> The PubMed Central site mentions 'You
> may NOT use any kind of automated process to download articles in bulk from
> the main PMC site. PMC will block the access of any user who is found to be
> violating this policy'. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/faq/#q12
> .
>
> [4] <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftnref2> http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/.
>
> [5] <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftnref3> https://doaj.org/about.
>
> [6] <#1493d5a8cf3b2cad__ftnref4> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/
> .
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/sigmetrics/attachments/20141023/439bc9d9/attachment.html>