The Subversive Proposal at 20

Twenty years ago yesterday, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad posted a message on a mailing list, a message he headed “A Subversive Proposal”. This called on all researchers to make copies of the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the Internet.

The message sparked a protracted discussion, and eventually led to the publication of a book called Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing.

Today the Subversive Proposal is viewed as one of the seminal texts of the open access movement.

To celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Subversive Proposal, I emailed Harnad nine questions yesterday. These questions are published below, with Harnad’s answers attached. 

Stevan Harnad

Q&A

RP: Today is the 20^th anniversary of the Subversive Proposal, a 496-word online message you posted to a mailing list on June 27^th1994 in which you called on researchers to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the Internet. The message sparked a heated online debate that later formed the basis of a book. What stimulated you to make that posting, and why do you think it attracted as much attention and disagreement as it did?

SH: Two things impelled me to do it:

(1)   I had been editing a journal of open peer commentary— Behavioral and Brain Sciences — for 16 years at the time, and had always had the feeling that the print-on-paper medium was not the optimal medium for scholarly communication.

(2)   I also had a strong belief in the creative power of interactive written dialogue, which became even stronger with the advent of the online medium. (I had dubbed this “scholarly skywriting.”)

For scholarly skywriting to work, it has to be accessible online. But although I knew about the price of subscriptions and the serials crisis at the time, that was not my primary motivation: open online access and interaction was (and still is). (I explained this more fully in your 2007 interview.)

As to attention: I’d have much been much happier if it had attracted action rather than just attention! The disagreement (which is always welcome, and can even be creative) was about the things we will go on to discuss further below: Green vs. Gold OA and, to a lesser extent, Gratis vs. Libre OA.

RP: Looking back, what contribution would you say the Subversive Proposal has made to the development of the OA movement, which in fact really only became a movement 7 years later (in 2001), when the term open access was adopted at the meeting where the Budapest Open Access Initiative was planned and articulated?

SH: I’m not sure. What I tried to urge all scholars to do in 1994 (self-archive their journal articles) some had already been doing for years (notably computer scientists in anonymous FTP archives since the 1980’s and physicists in arXiv since 1991), but I’m not aware that the self-archiving rate increased appreciably after my proposal. The proposal may have created a bit of a flurry, but it was a notional flurry: it was not heeded when it came to actual action (self-archiving).

At the 2001 BOAI meeting, self-archiving got a name — it became “BOAI OA Strategy I” (later dubbed “Green OA”).

“BOAI OA Strategy II” was OA journal publishing (“Gold OA”) and that option (though it too was mentioned in the Subversive Proposal as the likely end-game, after universal Green OA had prevailed) seems to have captured people’s imaginations more than Green OA did. In fact, across the years since 1990 authors were providing little OA at all, though of the minority who were providing OA, 2-3 times as many provided Green than Gold (and this is still true).

So, again, I don’t see much practicaleffect of the Subversive Proposal, either in 1994 or in the subsequent half-decade. Nor did Green OA begin to come into its own when I commissioned(and Rob Tansley created) the first free software for creating Green OA institutional repositories in 2000. BOAI helped; but the first real sign of progress came with the outcome of the 2004 UK Parliamentary Committee (which you phoned me in Barcelona to report, Richard!). The committee recommended following the proposal — by me and others — that UK research funders and universities should mandate (require) Green OA. (The Committee only recommended some experimental support for Gold OA.) After that, mandates began to grow (though still very slowly).

Gold vs. Green

RP: As you note, the Subversive Proposal invited researchers to adopt what later became known as Green OA.  Shortly before the BOAI meeting, Vitek Tracz founded the first open access publisher BioMedCentral, pioneering what became known as Gold OA. In the intervening years there has been a frequently bitter debate about the respective merits of Green and Gold OA. I realise you are an advocate for Green OA, but how would you characterise the pros and cons of these two types of OA?

SH: Pros of Gold OA: (1) Gold OA is immediate. (2) Gold OA can be made not just Gratis OA (freely accessible online) but also Libre OA (freely accessible online plus further re-use rights such as data-mining, re-mixing and re-publishing). (3) Gold OA could solve the journal affordability problem.

Cons of Gold OA: (1) Gold OA costs extra money (author publication fees), over and above what institutions already pay for subscriptions as long as subscription journals prevail (and they still do). (2) Gold OA payment to publish risks a decline in journals’ quality standards for acceptance (because journals are paid by authors to publish their work, not by users to access their work) as long as subscription journals prevail. (3) Gold OA payment cannot be mandated (required) as long as subscription journals prevail. (4) Pre-Green Gold OA is vastly overpriced (which is why I call it “Fool’s Gold”) as long as subscription journals prevail.

Pros of Green OA: (1) Green OA costs no extra money. (2) Green OA has no effect on journal quality standards. (3) Green OA can be mandated (required). (4) Green OA, once it is universally mandated by funders and institutions, can allow journal subscriptions to be cancelled, inducing all journals to cut obsolete costs (print edition, online edition, archiving, access-provision), downsize to just the provision of peer review, and convert to “Fair Gold” post-Green OA, paid for out of just a fraction of each institution’s subscription cancellation savings.

Cons of Green OA: (1) Authors do not self-archive spontaneously: like “publish or perish,” Green OA has to be mandated by their institutions and funders. (2) Publishers can (and 40% do) embargo Green OA self-archiving for 6-12 months or longer.  (3) Not all Green OA mandates are effective: it is important to adopt the most effective mandate model (which is the Liège/HEFCE mandate now also recommended after 10 years by BOAI-10).

You asked about the pro’s and con’s of Green and Gold OA. I’ve tried to list all of them. Although the numbers look balanced, I think anyone who gives it some thought will see that Green OA needs to be mandated first and Fair Gold will be scaleable and sustainable and fair only after Green OA has prevailed globally.

Mixed blessing?

RP: I think it fair to say that publishers were initially highly resistant to open access. Today, by contrast, I suspect no scholarly publisher would say that they did not support it. However, publishers clearly prefer Gold OA.  As an advocate for Green OA, would you say that publisher support for OA has been a mixed blessing? If so, why?

SH: Maximizing the access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact of their publicly funded research output is a research community (and tax-payer) matter, not a publishing industry matter. Publishers provide a service to the research community (the management of peer review); the web has made publishers’ other traditional service — access-provision — (along with its costs) obsolete. Journal publishers already realize this, but the research community has not yet realized it.

Journal publishers earn a great deal of revenue from subscriptions — disproportionally great; they know this too. But they would like to hold onto it for as long as possible.

Consequently, (some) journal publishers have embargoed Green OA to try to slow the growth of OA and to try to redirect it to (Fool’s) Gold OA, priced on their own terms, so as to sustain their current income levels, with the research community double-paying (subscriptions plus Fool’s Gold OA fees) until there is a full transition to Fool’s Gold on publishers’ terms. This route is not only pricey but it is extremely slow, with precious research access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact being continuously lost during the wait.

Green OA (universally mandated by research institutions and funders) could make the transition to 100% Green OA happen almost overnight (just as I had hoped in 1994 that spontaneous self-archiving would do), and the transition to Fair Gold OA (for peer review alone, all access-provision and archiving having been offloaded onto the global network of institutional Green OA repositories) won’t be far behind.

This is what (some) publishers are desperately trying to forestall, by embargoing Green OA and offering Fool’s Gold OA instead — under the pretext of supporting OA. These days, publishers no longer have any choice but to profess support for OA. But the research community has a choice about whether to provide OA in the publishers’ slow and expensive Fool’s-Gold way, or to provide it themselves, the Green way.  Researchers could have done it all spontaneously in 1994; let’s hope that their institutions and funders will now see to it that providing Green OA is effectively mandated before we lose yet another two decades of research access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact needlessly.

The HEFCE Policy

RP: As I understand it, you believe that the recently announced UK HEFCE open access policy has finally tipped the balance in favour of Green OA. There have also been a number of other green OA policies announced in the past few months, suggesting you may be right. However, as publishers are now actively promoting pure or Hybrid Gold OA (which most if not all now offer I think) and funders and research institutions have been busy creating gold OA funds, I have been wondering if we might not see many of these green policies fulfilled by means of pay-to-publish Gold OA.  Would that in your view be a good or a bad thing? Clearly it would increase the costs to the research community, but it would have the merit of providing immediate OA, and in many cases I assume it would also allow for reuse, so researchers would be free to text and data mine the papers.

SH: The UK HEFCE policy model for funders — immediate repository deposit required for eligibility for research evaluation, irrespective of whether access to the deposit is made immediately OA or OA is embargoed — together with its counterpart Liège policy model for institutions, once they are adopted globally, will guarantee 100% OA in short order (and will induce a transition to Fair Gold OA publishing not long after, with all the re-use rights users need). (Meanwhile, embargoed Green OA deposits are made almost-OA during any publisher embargo via the institutional repository’s automated request-copy Button, with which any user can request and the author can provide a copy for research purposes with one extra click each.)

But what (some) journal publishers would prefer is to continue to hold research hostage to the tolls they dictate, whether via subscriptions or via bloated Fool’s Gold OA publishing fees. Offering Hybrid Gold OA together with Green OA embargoes — a Trojan Horse to penetrate the research community — would be the optimal way for publishers to accomplish this: A subscription journal adopts a Green OA embargo to prevent its authors from providing immediate Green OA, but, by way of compensation, offers to sell authors immediate Fool’s Gold OA, for their article only, for a fee. So institutions must keep on paying subscriptions, at their current rates, until and unless all authors find extra money from some other source (usually already-scarce research funds) to pay the bloated Fool’s Gold fee: their research is held hostage to subscriptions until the research community coughs up the same inflated sums that they are paying now for subscriptions, but in the form of a Fool’s Gold fee; until then, either double payment or no OA. (And publishers offer as a sop that they will continuously adjust their prices so that they do not earn more than they did from subscriptions). 

What do I think? (not that it matters what I think): I couldn’t care less whether 100% OA is reached via Green or Gold. What I care about is that it is reached, and reached as soon as possible: it is already vastly overdue, at great cost in lost research access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact (at least 20 years’ worth). I think the research community was extremely foolish not to provide spontaneous Green OA in 1994. If they now prefer to double-pay for overpriced Fool’s Gold OA in order to prop up the revenue streams to which publishers have become accustomed, instead of just providing cost-free Green OA, that’s their own lookout. I am pushing for the universal adoption of effective mandates that ensure that all researchers do provide OA, one way or the other, now, and not another 20 years from now.

A word about re-use rights (“Libre OA”: data-mining, re-mixing and re-publishing):  I’m all for them, just as I’m all for Fair-Gold OA. I just don’t want them to get in the way of OA itself — already long overdue — as Fool’s Gold OA has done. Hybrid Gold subscription publishers are now dangling the prospect of Libre OA as an extra perk for paying for Fool’s Gold (as if that further justified embargoing Green Gratis OA). If researchers (or their funders or institutions) are able and willing to pay for this extra perk now, fine. But the fact is that funds are short and most fields don’t need Libre OA anywhere near as urgently as they need Gratis OA, whereas all fields need Gratis OA — and we are still nowhere near 100% (or 75%, or even 50%) Gratis OA yet.

So let the institutional and funder immediate-deposit mandates be complied with in any way that authors choose — cost-free Green or costly Gold — but let the immediate-deposit mandates be immediately adopted and immediately complied with, one way or the other.

Accessibility vs. Affordability

RP: OA advocacy was initially driven by two different, but related, concerns. As the people who have to pay the constantly-rising costs of journal subscriptions, librarians viewed OA as an answer to what you refer to as the affordability problem. That is, they supported OA because they assumed it would lower the costs of scholarly communication. By contrast, researchers (initially at least) viewed OA as a solution to the accessibility problem — i.e. they wanted their work to be accessible to as many other researchers as possible. But as librarians began to threaten journal cancelations the threat was that researchers would have access to fewer and fewer scholarly journals, thereby reducing accessibility. While we should not doubt that OA can solve the accessibility problem, it is far from clear today that it will also resolve the affordability problem — not least because publishers (and, it seems, many funders and governments) believe that OA should have no negative impact on the revenues of scholarly publishers. What are your current thoughts on this matter? Do you have any concern about the affordability problem, or is it only a desire for greater accessibility that motivates you?

SH: Many funders and governments? Not by my count. Only the UK’s RCUK, with its Finch Folly (now detoxified by HEFCE) and the well-intentioned but rather wilful Welcome Trust, as far as I know (with some echoed intentions — sans action — from Netherlands MP Sander Dekker).

But my sole interest in the journal affordability problem is inasmuch as it impinges on the research accessibility problem. Let me try to speak very directly, because there is a lot of double-talk on both sides, concerning OA:

(1)   Some publishers profess to be all for OA, but claim that unless subscriptions are protected during any transition, they will be ruined, and both research publication and peer review will die. This is self-interested disinformation, used to lobby against Green OA and Green OA mandates. It is these publishers’ current inflated revenue streams that they are trying to protect, not research publication, peer review or even the subscription model, let alone OA.

(2)   Some librarians profess to be for OA, but in practice, their pre-emptive threat to cancel subscriptions as a journal’s Green OA percentage increases is an extremely foolish policy, and against the interests of OA. Equally foolish and false, however, is any assurance from librarians that once all journals’ articles have reached 100% immediate-OA (anarchically, via Green OA mandates) they will not cancel their journals. (Of course they will! And should! It’s the only way to force journals to cut obsolete costs, downsize and convert to Fair-Gold OA at a scaleable, sustainable price — paid for out of institutions’ windfall subscription cancellation savings.)

(3)   If governments ignored publisher lobbying and did the arithmetic properly, they would immediately see that the interests of publicly funded research vastly eclipse those of the research publishing industry, and that the benefits of immediate Green OA vastly outweigh the arguments of (some) publishers for a slow double-paid transition to Fool’s Gold OA at their current asking prices, while holding Green OA at bay with embargoes.

So my reply to your question is that I care only about solving the research accessibility problem, as soon as possible. (It is already grotesquely overdue.) I believe the fastest and surest way to OA is to mandate immediate-deposit Green OA. And I am confident that once that has generated 100% Green OA, thereby solving the accessibility problem, Fair-Gold OA will follow, solving the affordability problem.

I also believe it would be foolish to go for a direct transition to Fool’s Gold OA instead. That would solve the accessibility problem, but certainly not the affordability problem. Publishers would be getting paid as much as before. But I don’t care. At this point, the only thing that matters is precious time, so much of it already having been needlessly wasted for two decades. If 100% immediate-OA can be attained faster by throwing scarce funds at Fool’s Gold OA during a double-paid transition period held in place by embargoing Green OA, so be it — But I don’t believe for a moment that this would indeed be the fastest way to reach 100% OA.

And I hope that researchers, institutions and funders are not foolish enough to buy it.

RP: You often express surprise at the time it is taking for the world to wake up to OA, which you have long argued is inevitable and optimal. Looking back, why do you think it is taking so long for something inevitable and optimal to be realised? And what in your view could the OA movement have done/still do to speed the transition up? Or do the kind of changes required inevitably take a very long time to achieve?

SH: I do not believe there is any natural or social or psychological or neurological law that says the transition to 100% OA had to take this long. I think the reasons it has been so slow are multiple (and I’ve been enumerating them in the BOAI self-archiving FAQ since 2002 as various forms of “Zeno’s Paralysis”). If I had to pick the two most prevalent ones they would be (1) groundless researcher fears of legal consequences if they self-archive and (2) equally groundless researcher fears that self-archiving is a lot of work. Of course, (3) publisher embargoes and (4) lobbying are designed specifically to stoke such groundless fears.

The cure for all this is for funders and institutions to adopt the HEFCE/Liège immediate-deposit Green OA mandate model.

OA and the developing world

RP: OA advocates argue that open access has a great deal to offer the developing world. In saying this, they point out that the high costs of subscribing to scholarly journals means that the accessibility problem is far greater in the global South, and so OA will be all the more beneficial. But if, as increasingly seems likely, the dominant model for providing open access becomes pay-to-publish Gold OA will researchers in the global South not find that while they can read as much third-party research as they wish, they will not be able to afford to publish their own work? I realise that OA advocates dismiss this fear by pointing out that OA publishers offer APC waivers (or reduced APCs) for researchers in the developing world. Researchers in the developing world, however, respond that they do not want charity, not least because charity can at any time be removed. Perhaps they have a point. Initially, the non-profit OA publisher PLOS provided waivers on a “no-questions-asked” basis. This was withdrawn in 2010. Then earlier this year PLOS further tightened up its waiver rules. Meanwhile, Elsevier’s APC waiver policy is even more daunting, reading “If an author would like their article to be published open access, but cannot afford these fees, then individual waiver requests are considered on a case-by-case basis and may be granted in cases of genuine need”. I am wondering who would relish going cap-in-hand to Elsevier in order to make a case for “genuine need”? What are your views on this?

SH: Pre-Green Fool’s Gold is Fool’s Gold, any way you cut the cake; North, South, East or West. Right now, any institution, in any country, that wants access to the refereed research literature must pay subscriptions for as much of it as it can afford, and must make do without access to the rest. Asking them to pay Gold OA fees now, on top of what they are already paying for subscriptions that they can already ill afford would be ludicrous, if it weren’t for all the publisher disinformation, lobbying, and embargoes — coupled with a goodly dose of “gold fever” in the research community that is even more foolish than I was in imagining that the research community would immediately do what was in its own best interests in response to the Subversive Proposal in 1994.

So my reply is, yes, Pre-Green Fool’s Gold is unscaleable, unsustainable, and unfair, not just for the Developing World but for everyone who is not rolling in excess cash. Let the Developing World (and everyone else) keep publishing in the best journals they can, without paying an extra penny beyond what they are already spending on subscriptions, and let the Developing World (and everyone else) mandate immediate-deposit Green OA. Do that, and the optimal and inevitable (and long overdue) will at long last be upon us. (Is that yet another ill-fated subversive proposal, doomed to fail over the next 20 years?)

A Subversive Proposal for 2014

RP: If you were composing the Subversive Proposal today how different would it be? Would it be different? If so, would you care to rephrase it to fit today’s environment? In other words, how would the Subversive Proposal look if written for a 2014 audience (in less than 500 words)?

SH: Knowing now, in 2014, that researchers won’t do it of their own accord, I would have addressed the proposal instead to their institutions and funders, and in less than 200 words:

To maximize the access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact of your publicly funded research output, mandate (require) that the refereed, revised, accepted final draft of all articles must be deposited in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication as a condition for research evaluation and funding. If you allow an embargo on making the deposit OA (freely accessible to all online), implement the automated almost-OA Button (and don’t let the embargo exceed 6-12 months at most). This is called “Gratis Green OA.” Do not pay for Gold OA journal publication fees (“Fool’s Gold”) until global Green OA has made subscriptions unsustainable; then you can pay for Fair-Gold out of your subscription cancellation savings. Fair-Gold will also be Libre OA (with re-use rights such as data-mining, re-mixing and re-publishing). Ignore publishers’ lobbying to the effect that Green OA will destroy peer-reviewed journal publishing: it will re-vitalize it and save the research community a lot of money while maximizing the access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact of their research.

RP: Thanks for answering my questions. Readers may also be interested in a 10-year review of the Subversive Proposal I wrote in 2004 — Ten Years After; and the 15-year review you wrote — The 1994 “Subversive Proposal” at 15: A Critique.

The Open Access Interviews: Deputy Director General of the Bureau of Policy at the National Natural Science Foundation of China

On May 15, 2014 both the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) announced new open access policies. 

Prof. Yonghe Zheng

Both funders’ policies require that all papers resulting from funded projects must be deposited in online repositories and made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication — a model pioneered by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008, when it introduced its influential Public Access Policy.

As a result of the new Chinese policies there will be a significant increase in the number of research papers freely available, not least because it comes at a time when the number of papers published by Chinese researchers is growing rapidly. In reporting news of the policies, Nature indicated that Chinese research output has grown from 48,000 articles in 2003, or 5.6% of the global total, to more than 186,000 articles in 2012, or 13.9%.

Of the latter figure, more than 100,000 papers, or 55.2% of Chinese output, involved some funding from the NSFC. Below I publish a Q&A conducted by email with Prof. Yonghe Zheng, Deputy Director General of the Bureau of Policy, NSFC.

The interview begins

Q: NSFC recently announced an open access policy. As I understand it, this policy will require researchers to deposit the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of research articles funded by NSFC into the organisation's repository and made open access 12 months after publication. The policy also says that earlier open access should be provided where the publisher allows. Presumably researchers will be able to choose to publish their papers either in subscription journals (and then self-archive them as green OA) or in open access journals (gold OA)

A: Yes, the researchers can choose to publish their papers in subscription journals or OA journals as they like.

Q: Does NSFC have a view on which form of OA is preferable and /or what percentage of the papers that will be deposited under the policy will be gold and what percentage green? And does it expect this percentage to change over time? Is green OA seen as a transition arrangement before moving to a fully gold OA environment for instance?

A: NSFC does not have any policy presumption on the percentage of green OA and gold OA papers, and we do not prefer researchers to publish papers in green or gold OA journals. The percentage of green/gold OA papers is naturally produced right now, and we anticipate this percentage will change over time. I guess gold OA is likely to take a much more important role in a decade or so.

Q: You say that the percentage of green and gold is naturally produced now. Presumably this means that some researchers are already embracing OA. If so, can you give me some estimate of the percentage of NSFC papers that are being made OA today, and what percentage of that percentage is green OA and what percentage is gold OA?

A: We know from experience that many researchers we fund are paying APCs to publish OA articles today, and many have deposited their AAM (author accepted manuscript) in the institutional repository of their organisation, like the one at CAS. But at the moment we do not have any statistics or reasonable estimates on the percentages of NSFC papers made OA. We would certainly like to develop that capacity as we implement our OA policy.

Q: Does NSFC allow researchers to use money from their grants to pay for gold OA? If so, are there any rules on how much they are able to spend on publishing a paper?

A: NSFC allows researchers to use the funding to pay for gold OA papers as they did before to pay journals to publish general papers under the funding plan.

Q: Does NSFC have a separate gold OA fund that researchers can apply to in order to pay for gold OA? If not, do you expect that such a fund will be set up in the future?

A: We have no specific fund for gold OA, but I am aware that other funding agencies in the world have these kind of funds. We need to study how to promote OA development in a sustainable way. Personally, I do not think it would be easy in NSFC to set up this kind of fund. Certainly we would need to consider a number of questions — fairness, for example, and the budgetary implications etc.

Q: Does NSFC have any bulk publishing/ membership agreements in place with scholarly publishers with regard to publishing papers gold OA (e.g. similar to the one CAS signed with BMC in 2009)? If so, can you give me the details? If not, does it expect to enter into similar agreements in the future?

A: Right now, we still have no agreement with regard to publishing OA papers with publishers. Some publishers are very interested in cooperating with us to promote OA. We need to do more evaluation before we design our policy plan.

Q: I believe that the policy has immediate effect. However, I do not think that the NSFC yet has a repository. What should researchers do in the meantime, and when do you expect the NSFC repository to become available?

A: We need to develop a repository in NSFC and I hope it will be ready before the end of 2016. Until then researchers will need to provide deposit information in their project reports, but they will not need to do any additional work before the repository is ready.

Q: You say that researchers need to provide deposit information in their project reports. Can I just check: This means that researchers will not need to deposit their papers until the repository is ready in 2016? If they do need to deposit now, where can they deposit their papers today?

A: As I say, NSFC is working to have its repository ready before the end of 2016 so that researchers can deposit their funded papers. In the meantime, we encourage them to deposit their papers in their respective institutional repositories. By the way, researchers are asked to provide the basic information of their publications in their annual report, and this information (including the abstracts of papers) is available on the Information Sharing Serving Website of NSFC here.

Q: Is NSFC building its repository itself, or will it outsource the work? If the latter, who do you expect to build the NSFC repository?

A: The NSFC IT centre will be in charge of calling for a bid for the development of the repository.

Here there be dragons

There was a topic last week to draw a firedrake(dragon).  Seemed like a perfect opportunity to draw like Nico Marlet.  That man is a genius.  I tried to capture a bit of his style in this one, but still have it be my own.  I'm really pleased with the results.  Cheers.

Mummy

I just love drawing monsters.  Is there anything funner to draw?  When the topic for sketch dailies was a mummy i was so excited because I had this little guy ready and waiting.  Cheers.

Mario

I started this Mario for sketch dailies thinking it would be a real quick sketch but I started coloring it and just couldn't stop.  I was having so much fun with it I had to continue.  Cheers.

Open Access in India: Q&A with Subbiah Arunachalam

Today the world is awash with OA advocates, and the number of them grows year by year. But it was not always thus. 

Subbiah Arunachalam

When Chennai-based information scientist Subbiah Arunachalam began calling for OA, for instance, there were hardly any other OA advocates in India, and not a great many more in the rest of the world either.

Yet like all developing countries, India faced (and continues to face) a serious access problem with regard to the scholarly literature — a function of the fact that the costs of subscribing to scholarly journals are very high, and these costs consistently rise at a faster rate than overall inflation. As a result, Indian scientists do not have access to all the journals they need to do their job properly.

Arunachalam had long been puzzling over how India’s access problem could be solved, and he had (unsuccessfully) tried a number of ways to resolve it himself. Then in 1996 his attention was drawn to Stevan Harnad’s 1994 Subversive Proposal — which called on all researchers to self-archive their papers on the Internet so that they were free for anyone to read.

Immediately seeing the potential of self-archiving, or what later became known as Green OA, Arunachalam decided to organise a two-day workshop at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) Chennai, to which he invited Harnad. This was in 2000.

Since then Arunachalam has devoted a great deal of time and energy advocating for OA in India, an activity that must at times have been a somewhat lonely experience. As the manager of Library and Information Services at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) Muthu Madhan put it recently, “OA advocacy in India can be characterised as mostly a one-man effort by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam.”

But Arunachalam's commitment to the OA cause has gradually borne fruit. “His advocacy was largely responsible for OA developments at IASc, INSA, CSIR and ICAR”, says Madhan. “He organised many workshops and conferences (on OA-related topics) and mobilised funds to bring overseas experts (such as Alan Gilchrist, Stevan Harnad, Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan, Leslie Carr, Alma Swan, John Willinsky, and Abel Packer) and Indian experts and participants.”

What drives Arunachalam is a firm belief that open access holds out the promise of a faster and more effective system for creating and sharing new knowledge, one, moreover, that will not discriminate against the developing world in the way the current subscription system does. And this belief is rooted in a lifetime's experience as an editor of scientific journals, a student of science (electrochemistry), and a period working as secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Arunachalam has also been on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including the Journal of Information Science, Scientometrics, Current Science, and Public Understanding of Science, and he worked for twelve years as a volunteer with MSSRF, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to rural development.

Currently Arunachalam is a distinguished fellow with the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), and an Honorary Fellow of the UK’s CILIP. He also teaches science writing to students of journalism.

(More on Arunachalam’s background and career is available in three earlier interviews undertaken in 2006 and 2010 — here, hereand here).

Looking back, what does Arunachalam feel has been achieved since he began his OA advocacy 14 years ago, and how would he characterise the current state of OA in India? To find out, I put to him recently the ten questions below.

Reading his answers, a couple of things immediately stood out for me. First, I was struck by Arunachalam’s insistence that Green OA is all that is required. Second, I was struck that, while he recognises that Gold OA is nevertheless an inevitable development of the open access movement (and very much a reality now), he does not believe that it is necessary for OA journals to levy article-processing charges (APCs).

To support the latter claim, Arunachalam refers to the situation in Latin America, where the operating costs of running OA journals are invariably underwritten by research institutions. As such, there is no need to charge authors (or their funders) to publish their papers.

He adds that (leaving aside the plague of predatory publishers that have been setting up shop in the country over the past few years) it is not the norm in India for OA journals to charge APCs either.

So, for instance, none of the journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) or the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) charge APCs. “The cost of running the journals is not much and it is often covered by the funding agency,” explains Arunachalam.

He adds, “Of late Current Science, which has a large following, has become self-sustaining (through institutional membership and advertisements).”

This is a point that Madhan has made too. The only program where an Indian funding agency explicitly permits APCs for scientists, he explains, is the alliance between the UK’s Wellcome Trust and the Indian Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

Not for the first time, I found myself concluding that OA looks set to grow into something rather different in the developing world to what it is becoming in the Global North.

The interview begins

RP: When and why did you become an OA advocate?   

SA: My interest in the problems we face in India in getting access to research papers predates the open access movement, and was initially focused on trying to get copies of used journals sent over from the US.

In 1982, for instance, Eugene Garfield invited me to a four-day workshop entitled Advances in Information Access he held at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. After the workshop I spent more than a month in the US and met many Indian academics in different cities there. On meeting them I asked them all if they would send me the journals they subscribed to after they had used them so that I could distribute them to academic libraries in India. Remember those were days when getting foreign exchange was next to impossible in India and most academic libraries had only a few journals on their shelves.

I visited about 20 cities while I was in the US, travelling coast to coast on an Eastern Airways ticket (a travel as you please ticket sold at $400). I met many people whom I had never seen or known before and all of them were very kind — they came to the airport, took me home, provided hospitality for a night or two, organised small gatherings of Indian academics to meet and hear me. But while almost all those whom I met were appreciative of my idea of sending used journals to India, nothing ever materialised. 

Subsequently Dr Garfield and I discussed the possibility of shipping journal issues indexed in Current Contents to India, organising them into proper collections at a central location and then distributing them to selected academic libraries.

I and a friend, Prof. Balasubramanian Viswanathan of the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, worked hard on this idea, but for obvious reasons it too did not take off. Years later Prof. Viswanathan set up a repository for the Catalysis Society of India and populated the repository all by himself.

My interest in promoting open access began around 1996, when I started working as a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, and at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) Chennai, where I was a volunteer for 12 years (1996-2008).

In 1994 Stevan Harnad had posted his iconic Subversive Proposal online. While at the time I missed the discussion that followed, Dr Garfield reprinted and commented on Stevan’s proposal in Current Contents. This inspired me in 2000 to invite Stevan to speak at a two-day workshop I organised at the MSSRF, thanks to financial support from the engineering company Larson & Toubro.

After the workshop, I travelled with Stevan for about a week. All my efforts until then had been on trying to make information available to researchers in the way I described, but after spending some quality time with Stevan I was inspired to start promoting open access and to try to improve access to Indian research by means of OA.

So in 2002 I invited Leslie Chan of Toronto University and Barbara Kirsopto organise two three-day workshops on electronic publishing, with financial support from several international organisations. And I persuaded two of India’s most prestigious scientific institutions — the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science — to co-sponsor the workshops with MSSRF. Fifty participants from all parts of India were trained in two batches.

Then in 2004, I invited Leslie Carr of Southampton University and Leslie Chan to conduct two three-day workshops on the EPrintsrepository software and open access, again at MSSRF and with financial support from a number of international institutions. There were about fifty participants from all parts of India, including ten from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

It took a while for the impact of this workshop to materialise. Indeed, to this day two thirds of those who attended the workshop have done hardly anything to promote OA. I was particularly unhappy about ICAR and some of the large universities for their inaction.

On the other hand some of those who attended — notably Mr Sukhdev Singhand Mr Muthu Madhan — have become real champions of OA in India.

I began to campaign actively for open access in other ways too — talking about the need to embrace OA, especially in developing countries, wherever I went, and sending out advocacy emails to a large number of researchers in both academic and (publicly-funded) research institutions, as well as funding agencies. It was at this point that some people in India began to refer to me as Mr Open Access!

Achievements and disappointments

RP: What would you say have been the biggest achievements since you became an OA advocate, and what have been the biggest disappointments?

SA: In terms of achievements, I would point to the activities of the Indian Academy of Sciences and of Dr Dev K Sahu,  a paediatrician-turned journal publisher.

The Academy started experimenting with OA as far back as 1998-99. Initially it made Current Science (co-published with Current Science Association) and Pramana (its physics journal) OA. Later all 10 of its journals went OA, and today its repository (which contains papers published by its Fellows, both living and deceased) has more than 90,000 items in it, although a substantial number of them provide only the abstract and not the full paper.

With regard to the contribution of Dr Sahu, when he attended the first workshop I organised in 2000 he was already publishing many journals under the banner Medknow in Bombay, and he had experimented with both electronic journals and OA. [RP: Medknow was acquired by Wolters Kluwer in 2011].

As to my personal successes, they began when the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) adopted open access (with OAI-PMH compliance). True, it took a few years, but the results are very satisfying to me.

Today more than 25 of the 37 laboratories under CSIR have their own repositories (although some of them are far from comprehensive) and they have their own central repository and harvestermanaged from Pune. CSIR has also made all 16 of its journals (published by its publishing arm the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Research) open access.

More recently, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has announced a comprehensive open access policy. And both the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and ICAR made their journals open access a few years ago. I have to thank my friends John Willinskyof Stanford and Leslie Chan for helping me to convince ICAR to make its journals OA (I took both of them to see the chief editor and deputy director general of ICAR). However, I played no role in the ICMR journals going OA, so can claim no credit there.

Likewise, I cannot claim to have influenced ICMR — in fact my efforts to persuade it to set up institutional repositories in its laboratories have to this day failed to bear fruit.

Another success to highlight (and for which again I can claim no credit) is that by the time I began advocating for OA many Indian high energy and condensed matter physicists had been placing their preprints in arXiv for well over a decade, and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madrashad created a mirror server of arXiv.

In addition, ICRISAT(a CGIAR centre located in India) is the first CGIAR centre to have a near-complete OA repository. This was the work of my friend and former MSSRF colleague Dr Venkataraman Balaji, who is currently promoting open education and MOOCs at Commonwealth of Learning.

I mentioned earlier that Mr Muthu Madhan attended the workshop on EPrints and open access that I organised in 2004. Mr Madhan is now with ICRISAT (having previously worked at the MSSRF) and has helped half a dozen institutions set up their own institutional repositories. The first of these was at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, which institution has the distinction of having adopted the first comprehensive OA mandate in India, one that covers journal articles, conference papers, theses, etc.

More recently, ICRISAT became the second research centre located in India to adopt an OA mandate.

Overall today, India has around 100 OA repositories, although not all of them are active. And the information and library network INFLIBNET now hosts more than 9,000 full text records from more than 140 institutions. There has also been a concerted effort to make scientists and librarians in India aware of the nuances of copyright and Creative Commons licenses, but the fruits of these efforts are yet to be seen or felt. 

Among my disappointments are the fact that both the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India and the then Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology — who could have easily issued an OA mandate for publicly-funded research in India similar to the oneissued last year in the US by John Holdren of the Office of Science Technology Policy (OSTP) — have remained unmoved by all the reasoned arguments of OA advocates. Let us hope their successors are OA friendly.  

Another minor concern I have is that the former editor of Current Science, one of India’s most respected scientists and commentators on science policy, and a member of the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is unwilling to extend his firm support for OA to calling for it to be mandated.

I would also note that some years ago the former Director General of CSIR said he was ready to convert all the organisation's journals to OA, to request that all CSIR laboratories set up IRs, and to mandate OA. However, although he did make CSIR's journals OA, and he did request all CSIR labs to set up repositories, he did not mandate OA before he left office. As a result, less than 30 of the 40 CSIR institutions have yet set up OA IRs, and many of those created are failing to attract deposits.

So while CSIR’s journals are OA today, and while over half of its labs now have repositories, there is only an OA policy in place, not a mandate. As a consequence, the repositories have only proved partially successful, with many laboratories and scientists not complying with the policy.

Beyond India, a letter to the top management of CGIAR that I organised in 2010 (along with fifteen other OA advocates) suggesting that CGIAR introduce a system-wide OA policy and mandate finally led to a policy in 2013. 

Gold, Green, and Hybrid

RP:  There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about the respective roles that Green and Gold OA should play. What would you say should be the respective roles of Green and Gold OA in the context of the developing world today?

SA: I have absolutely no reservations about Green. It makes a lot of sense, as was demonstrated as early as 1991 when Paul Ginsparg, then at LANL, set up arXiv. The CERN and SLAC preprint services existed even before that.

The way I see it is that researchers do the research, they write the papers to report their findings, and they read and use each other’s papers as part of the process of advancing knowledge. Today the Internet and related technologies facilitates the better sharing of those papers. So a fully Green future is eminently possible and should be our goal.

If that is only possible by introducing a mandate then I am all for such a mandate, notwithstanding the fact that I am a champion of freedom of the individual. If a chancellor of a university can insist that a teaching professor should teach a certain number of hours, conduct examinations in the subjects he teaches and evaluate and grade the answer papers, what is wrong if he insists (or mandates) that any research done from within the university should be deposited in the university’s repository? 

I am not enthusiastic about Gold OA however, especially if it requires paying an article processing charge (APC). Nevertheless, I can see that in regions like Latin America Gold OA without APCs seems to be doing well, as witnessed by the thousands of journals in SciELO, Redalyc and Latindex.

Even in this region, however, Green OA is picking up — as witnessed by the OA legislation adopted both by Argentina and Mexico. And many countries and regions including the European Union, the USand Australia have come up with OA policies that predominantly support OA by means of Green channels.

What is clear is that both Green and Gold OA are a reality today, and they will surely continue to coexist, if for no other reason than that not all researchers in countries like India can be persuaded to deposit their papers in OA repositories immediately. 

We could also note that the OJS software developed in Vancouver — which is freely available and allows anyone to set up a journal — has been adopted by more than 10,000 journals around the world.

So pragmatism demands that, while I may want to see the world move to an entirely Green future, I need to accommodate Gold — so long as it does not incur an APC. In fact none of the journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, CSIR, ICMR and ICAR in India do charge an APC.

It is also worth noting that journals that charge huge subscriptions, and most Gold OA journals that charge high APCs, claim that these charges are necessary to meet the costs of the high standard of services provided. And this argument appears to have been accepted by funding agencies like the Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK, who are ready to provide grants to meet these high APCs.

Yet I wonder if many in the developed world know that those scholarly publishers who publish hundreds of journals actually employ low-paid staff in cities like Madras and the suburbs of Delhi to carry out these services, including copyediting, manuscript flow, and production. Every major STM publisher gets such work done in India (and some other developing countries) at a very low cost. So in reality high APCs and subscription charges are simply fuelling the excessive profits that publishers based in the Global North are making, and support the high pay and perks of the executives who run these companies.

The question is: should scientists be underwriting a process that has made the STM journal publishing industry one of the most profitable industries in the world?  Especially when better alternatives are available?

RP: What about Hybrid OA? What role, if any, do you see for that?

SA: Including a few OA papers in an otherwise non-OA journal is not a very attractive proposition, especially, if the publisher charges a huge APC for making the articles OA and is simultaneously charging a huge subscription for the journal.

Unsurprisingly, authors do not seem to like the idea. The number of OA papers in non-OA journals is pretty low. Publishers may wish to offer Hybrid OA in order to show that they are friendly to the concept of OA, but I do not think the research community has anything to gain from the arrangement.

RP: How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in India and internationally?

SA: I would say that lot more could have been achieved since the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) if we had not wasted a considerable amount of energy arguing amongst ourselves, sometimes acrimoniously.

That said, in the past two years the OA movement has gained considerable momentum. Although the Finch Committee recommendation turned out to be a bit of a disaster, developments in the US, Europe and elsewhere have proved to be big gains for the international OA movement.

So far as India is concerned, there is still a lack of clarity about the benefit of and need for open access, amongst researchers and officials in policymaking bodies, and amongst funding agencies. This is largely because many of them have not taken the trouble to read the basic OA texts and follow developments, even when the details are sent to their mailbox.  

To incentivise those in the developing world, the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) has introduced an annual award for individuals who have advanced the cause of open access in any developing or transition country.

In the inaugural year this award was won by the unassuming Francis Jayakanth, of India, and by Iryna Kuchma of EIFL in 2012. A quick review of the nominations for the award demonstrates the enthusiasm and efforts made in a range of areas in a number of countries. In 2013 the award was shared by Mr Muthu Madhan of India and Ms Rosemary Otando of Kenya.

So overall I would say the movement is gaining momentum, but rather slowly. For-profit publishers continue to do all they can to stall the progress of OA. To this day they object to authors placing their research papers in a central repository (except in a few cases like PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central); in countries like India funders often prefer a central repository.

One major concern is the mushrooming of predatory OA journals, and Jeffrey Beall’s list makes it clear that India is home to many such journals. Agencies supervising higher and technical education evaluate individuals (when granting research fellowships and assessing promotions) by the number of papers published, and these predatory journals are using that to their advantage. 

Priorities

RP: What still needs to be done, and by whom?

SA: I will restrict my reply to India.

The heads of funding agencies — almost all of them agencies of the Government of India — should mandate OA and insist that research institutions set up institutional repositories. Currently, I am in conversation with two of these agencies with regard to developing an OA policy for them, and I sense a positive outcome.

The Indian parliament should enact a law requiring that research papers (and the associated data) resulting from public funding are made open. As I noted, Argentina already has such a law. India should introduce one too.

Fellows of all academies should send memoranda supporting open access to the Ministers of Science and Technology, Human Resource Development, Health and Agriculture. I am in touch with the President of one of the academies to this effect.

Citizens in India should form a Taxpayers Alliance for Open Access, and university students should form a nationwide “Students for open access” forum.  

For OA advocates specifically the priorities should be to:

(1)           convince the large number of researchers of the need to adopt OA, and of the need to retain certain rights in their work, rather than surrender them all by signing the copyright agreements that publishers put in front of them,

(2)           convince the directors of research laboratories and vice chancellors of universities to set up interoperable institutional repositories,

(3)           lobby parliamentarians to enact legislation requiring that all publicly funded research is made openly accessible, and of course,

(4)           join forces with like-minded people, and those who can bring knowledge and skills that we do not have. I am thinking, for instance, of experts in copyright law and Creative Commons — scholars like Lawrence Liangand activists like Sunil Abraham. We in India should be part of the international OA movement and learn from the experience of others.  

RP: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today?

SA: To march towards 100% OA for all of science and scholarship, preferably through the institutional repository route. And where currently the emphasis is largely on STM, we should work to make all of social sciences and humanities research OA as well.

RP: What does OA have to offer the developing world?

SA: A great deal. In a world without OA — where all of us have to pay to gain access — most developing country researchers, teachers and students have access to just a tiny little part of the research that would be useful to them. With OA, the universe of available knowledge expands hugely. In addition, OA allows researchers in the developing world to have their own work seen and used by scientists all around the world.

OA can improve access to scholarly information — and thus the visibility and use that is made of it — at one stroke. As such, it promises to benefit the whole world and help speed up the creation of new knowledge.

It would also facilitate the participation of citizens in science — Galaxy Zoo; the many amateur astronomers in Japan and elsewhere; and the award-winning work of the American school student Jack Andraka are good examples of this.

OA would also better facilitate crowd sourcing in science. Much of molecular biology today depends on sharing data through databases like GenBank. Consider also that when Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers published an unsolved problem on his blog it was solved in 32 days by the collective inputs of 27 mathematicians from around the world, who made 800 substantive contributions. In each one of these examples, one can imagine people from the developing world participating and making valuable contributions.

One absurd consequence of toll-access publishing is that in many developing countries work done in one laboratory may not be noticed by researchers in other laboratories in the same country, because their libraries are not able to afford to subscribe to the journal in which the paper is published. All that would change with open access.

In addition, if developing country institutions have IRs of their own and if their researchers deposit all their papers in them, then it is easy to monitor the progress made by each one of these researchers, and to develop different kinds of analytics for evaluating their contributions. 

Of course, we need also to ensure that scientists everywhere, even in the poorest countries, have access to computers and high bandwidth Internet connectivity at affordable costs.

Expectations

RP:  What are your expectations for OA in the next 12 months?

SA: We already have many funder OA policies and many national policies around the world. Thanks to the decision by OSTP to expand public access, many funding agencies in the US will soon have their own OA policy too (similar to the NIH policy) and that will see a large number of papers by US authors deposited in open access repositories.

And as I noted, OA laws are being introduced around the world, including Argentina and more recently in Mexico. We can hope to see similar laws passed in other countries in the next 12 months.

In the meantime, the share of research content that is made available OA continues to rise. Last year a Canadian group suggested that OA had reached a tipping point, with around 50% of scientific papers published in 2011 now available for free. By contrast, a studypublished in PLOS ONElast month Madian Khabsa and Lee Giles report that only 24% of English language papers indexed in Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Research are OA. But whatever the precise numbers, the percentage of papers made OA can only be expected to increase going forward.

Alas, in India we seem to be a bit slow! But the indications are that some important announcements will be made here too soon. The Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology (who is also currently heading the department of Science and Technology) is very keen to develop an OA policy for these two departments. And we can expect the Indian Academy of Sciences to start discussing the role it can play in advancing OA in the country soon too.      

      

So in general things are looking up, but we should remember that OA advocates are not the policy makers or implementers!

This means that while the international OA community is now more cohesive, and anyone seeking help can easily get it, the publishing fraternity is looking for ways to protect the benefits they have long enjoyed, and if that requires stalling the growth of OA, by fair means or foul, they are ready to do that.

This suggests that we can expect to see both new successes and new setbacks over the next 12 months.

RP: Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing?

SA: Undoubtedly it can be. As I said, the subscription prices of many commercial journals are set at very high levels, and this is largely to generate huge profits for publishers — who enjoy 35-40% profit margins year after year (and continued to do so even when the economy was in a downturn).

Since these prices carry on growing every year it is extremely difficult for even the most well-endowed libraries to retain all the journals that they subscribe to. The situation is that research funders pay for carrying out research and publishers then expect them to pay again to buy back the findings of the research! So the research community ends up paying twice, and at ever increasing prices. All this double dipping is unnecessary in the era of the Internet.

The problem is that when these publishers offer OA they offer it at an equally high price, which is one reason why I am not in favour of paying APCs. From the perspective of India, Indian researchers publish about half of their papers in overseas journals, some of which charge a fee to make a paper OA. In a country where there are far more important priorities for the limited resources available, it is unacceptable, and even immoral, to divert funds for this purpose.

The point is that it need not be like this. In India, most of the better-known journals are published either by an Academy of Sciences or by a government research agency. None of these journals charge either to read or to publish. The cost of running the journals is not much and it is often covered by the funding agency.

I would also point out that of late Current Science, which has a large following, has become self-sustaining (through institutional membership and advertisements). In the West this may not be the norm and subscription journals will continue, but here is a model that the developed world might like to consider.

So in answer to your question as to whether OA will be an less expensive than subscription publishing: There answer is that it can be, so long as we do not simply swap high subscription prices for high APC prices.

If we can avoid that then as more and more papers around the world become available through OA repositories (and OA journals) researchers will have free access to them and the amount libraries need to spend on non-OA content will be less and less. Research will have greater value for money invested. The money saved can be used to buy monographs or laboratory equipment or to support research students. This is especially true for developing countries where costs do matter.