[GOAL] Titanium Killer Apps and OA

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Arthur Sale <ahjs at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

I really don’t understand how Stevan manages to call the Titanium Road “a
> technologically supercharged version of the Green Road”, but Stevan can
> explain that statement if he wishes.
>

The Gold Road to OA means the author publishes the paper in an OA journal
and *the journal makes the paper accessible free for all online.*

The Green Road to OA means the author publishes the paper in any journal
and, in addition, *the author makes the paper accessible free for all online
* ("author self-archiving").

The "Titanium Road" to OA consists of new user tools with which the author
can make the article accessible free for all online ("author
self-archiving").

Hence the "Titanium Road" is merely a technologically enhanced version of
the Green Road ("author self-archiving").

There are only two roads to OA (free online access): The journal does it or
the author does it.


> **
>
> ** The more important issue is that I have failed to get across to him
> that the Titanium Road has nothing to do with researcher voluntarism.
>

Volunteerism means that *in order to make their papers OA, researchers have
to do something that they are not currently doing*, of their own accord,
not because of an institutional or funder requirement.

Using new tools, voluntarily, is volunteerism.

The Gold Road does, because unless the researcher is funded by the Wellcome
> Trust or its like, he or she is likely to have to volunteer to divert money
> from his or her research grant to pay the author-side fees.
>

You've missed the much more fundamental volunteer step in publishing in a
Gold OA journal, Arthur:
*
*
*Choosing to publish in a Gold OA journal rather than in a non-OA journal.*


> The Green Road also does, because the researcher has to volunteer to
> undertake unnatural extra work to deposit works in the institutional
> repository through a clunky interface.
>

The volunteer step in Green OA self-archiving is: Choosing to self-archive.

The "clunkiness" of the interface is a technological matter. Not everyone
would agree that filling out a few obvious form-interface fields (login,
password, author, title, journal, date, etc.) is so "clunky" or "unnatural"
in a day when we are filling out online forms all the time. It's just a few
minutes' worth of keystrokes.

But my friend Arthur is profoundly mistaken if he thinks that the reason
why over 80% of researchers are *not* voluntarily self-archiving today is
because they find it too "clunky" to do the keystrokes.

I wish it were that simple. But in fact there are at least 38 reasons
researchers why do not voluntarily self-archive --
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#38-worries -- and their worry
that doing so might be "clunky" is just one of them (and usually based on
never even having tried it out).

(But I do think that it is his implicit assumption that the real deterrent
to OA is having to do too many keystrokes that makes Arthur think that a
new technology has come along (the "Titanium Road") that authors will find
so effortless, attractive and beneficial, that they will (voluntarily) take
to it, do all their keystrokes in a new way, for a new purpose, and one of
the side-effects will be that their papers will have become effectively OA
(i.e., accessible online, free for all).

This is what is called a *hypothesis*. And I certainly wish that Arthur's
hypothesis were to prove true -- that the natural advantages of the
Titanium Technology prove to attract all researchers in all disciplines
worldwide of their own accord so quickly that it closes the persistent 80%
OA gap as fast as Green OA mandates would have done, and that it does so
faster than it will take to persuade the world's funders and institutions
to adopt Green OA mandates.

But for my own part, across the last 2 long decades, I have already lived
through far too many high hopes for yet another OA "Killer App" that will
"tip" us to 100% OA in short order (FTP, the web, Arxiv, OAI, EPrints, IRs,
SWORD, etc. etc.). I think it would be a mistake to wait for uptake of this
latest App (Mendeley, etc.), and a mistake to yet again divert OA advocacy
time and effort toward promoting the use and benefits of the Titanium
Technology instead of devoting the lion's share of OA advocacy efforts to
promoting Green OA mandates.

They even hate to deposit a version of the article that they have no
> confidence in (the Accepted Manuscript).
>

Arthur: Over 80% of researchers hate to deposit *any version at all*, and
don't! Worries about versions are just one of the at-least 38 reasons
researchers don't deposit, year upon year upon year.

And the point is that all 38+ reasons are groundless. But it is now evident
that it is hopeless to try to persuade researchers of this, one by one,
researcher by researcher, reason by reason, year upon year upon year.

That's why deposit has to be mandated. (That way, only researchers' funders
and institutions need to be persuaded!)


> So few of them do it, and they backslide so easily, that the only solution
> is to force them to do it (a mandate). Since mandates rely on persuasion of
> key executives who are themselves usually ex-researchers and are
> transitory, voluntarism is an intrinsic thread running through the Green
> Road.
>

You are quite right that persuading the key executives of research
institutions and funders to adopt an OA self-archiving mandate is a
substantial challenge. But I think time has shown that it is the challenge
that can yield the greatest OA dividends, the fastest, and that it hence
deserves far more time and effort now than pinning our hopes yet again on
trying to promote the adoption of a new killer-app by researchers.

The volunteerism in question here, by the way, is *the volunteer stroking
of keys by researchers*. Of course all human decisions, including
institutional executive ones, are "free-willed" decisions. But casting that
as just another variant of the OA voluntarism problem misses the fact that *it
is individual researcher voluntarism that is failing*, and that persuading
key executives to (voluntarily!) mandate researcher keystrokes is not quite
the same thing.

Wendy Hall (Southampton), Tom Cochrane (QUT) and Bernard Rentier (Liege),
after all, are "key executives", and they have chosen, of their own free
will, to mandate the OA self-archiving (keystrokes).

One of the key objectives of EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) -- of which
Bernard Rentier is Director (and Tom Cochrane is a Board member) -- is to
advise their fellow key executives at other institutions worldwide on how
to mandate the keystrokes that are the only thing that stands between us
and 100% OA.

****
>
> ** I liken the Titanium Road with the situation with Electronic Theses
> and Dissertations (ETDs). Where universities mandate the deposit of an
> electronic copy of the thesis, the deposit rate easily reaches completeness
> (and I mean 100%, not the 80% or so ID/OA mandated articles sometimes
> achieve). It never retreats from that. Why? Because the action required of
> the graduating student is completely natural and they’ve always expected to
> do it. The university simply says “instead of depositing two bound copies
> of your thesis with the university before graduating, give us one and an
> electronic copy”. Or in even more enlightened universities “just give us an
> electronic copy”. The student does what is asked, and is even happy that
> copying the files to a CD or DVD is much, much easier than waiting for 100s
> of pages to print, finding a binder who can do black card covers and gold
> lettering, and paying for all of it. The success of ETD schemes is that
> they are natural, and simply electronicize a function that is already part
> of a PhD student’s activity.
>

This is alas where theorizing gets in our way:

The reason students deposit theses as mandated is *because deposit is
mandated*. Volunteer deposit means unmandated deposit.
And the reason most researchers don't deposit is because *deposit is
mandated by fewer than 200 institutions*, out of at least 10,000 worldwide!
(see ROARMAP <http://roarmap.eprints.org/>).

Moreover, many of those first 200 mandates are wishy-washy
ones<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/494-guid.html>,
without a clear indication of what to do and how, and without any mechanism
for monitoring compliance.

Not so with Tom Cochrane's or Bernard Rentier's ID/OA mandates at QUT and U
Liege. And the Liege mandate model, the most effective one of all, *designates
deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional
performance assessment*: “instead of mailing paper copies or emailing
digital copies of your publications to the university for performance
assessment, deposit one electronic copy in the institutional repository”.

You, Arthur, are attributing the success to the fact that depositing is
"natural."

But the real reason for the success is that it is mandatory (in both cases).

The Titanium Technology may prove quite natural to use, but to get everyone
to use it, you would have to mandate it. That's certainly not in the cards.
But mandating deposit is.


> **
>
> ** So to the Titanium Road, which is directly aimed at existing
> researcher practice and psychology. Every researcher worth a cent keeps a
> record of all their publications (and sometimes their unpublished works
> too).
>

Are you sure?

But let's suppose that's so. Now let's go on:


> Being a person who grew up with computers but still in the Gutenberg era,
> I still have an archive box under the house with paper copies of all my
> early publications, going back to my 1969 PhD thesis and several earlier
> publications. A list of all the publications also exists in my curriculum
> vitae (cv), and I keep both up to date. Did any serious researcher do
> differently then?
>

I expect that most researchers maintain and update online CVs.

So far so good. Let's go on:

But the times are changing. While I may have produced one of the world’s
> early word-processed PhD theses (I wrote the word processing software
> myself too, and took over the university’s mainframe to run it off on the
> console IBM typewriter in night-time hours), I did not keep a
> ‘machine-readable copy’ (it was in several boxes of 80-column punched
> cards). Nowadays that is exactly what I do. I rely on electronic apps to
> keep my recent records.
>

Few were as advanced as you then, and chances are that not many are as
advanced as you now either; but let's suppose it is so. Let's suppose that
researchers now retain digital versions of both their CVs and the papers
they publish.

Nevertheless, 80% of them are not doing the keystrokes to deposit these
digital documents in their institutional repositories unless it is
mandated.

So what next?

**
>
> ** The Titanium Road is predicated on researchers doing just this:
> keeping the records of their publications (full text and citations) online
> and in the cloud.
>

What percentage of them do you think are doing this now? What percent will
be doing it next year, in 10 years?

*Those are the numbers to beat*, if you think this is better, surer and
faster to reach 100% OA than mandating deposit.


> The only tiny missing step is access to this huge resource, probably
> rapidly heading for 100% data coverage.
>

That's like saying there's only one tiny missing step missing in my
perpetual-motion machine!

The problem has been to get authors to make their papers accessible free
for all online -- not to get them to write them, or to write them
digitally, or to store them digitally. They're mostly doing that already,

Now I agree that *if all else were indeed in place* so that making papers
accessible free for all online really only cost the author *one single
keystroke*, it would be considerably easier to persuade them to do that one
single keystroke (despite the 38 groundless worries that have been holding
them back till now).

But all else certainly isn't in place (in the "cloud"). And your hypothesis
amounts to the hope that it will be in place -- more quickly and surely
than mandating it -- because researchers will adopt the Titanium Killer-App
of their own accord faster than institutions and funders can be persuaded
to mandate deposit!

(Yes, we do indeed disagree, profoundly, on that empirical prediction --
which doesn't mean that I am against Killer-Apps, Titanic or otherwise.
Just that I'm against waiting for them on the hope that they will be
spontaneously adopted globally fast enough to do the trick. And I'm even
more against again slacking in efforts to promote deposit mandates in favor
of promoting new Killer-Apps.)


> Emails to the author asking for access are an ‘almost OA’ option, just
> like the ID/OA Green Road,
>

Emailing the author for an eprint is *not* what is meant by "Almost-OA". To
email the author for an eprint you first need to find there's a paper, find
the author's email address, and email the author to send an eprint. That's
a lot of keystrokes, and a lot of time, for both the requester and the
author.

For "Almost-OA" (as defined in our joint paper!) the eprint must first be
deposited in the author's institutional repository (in *Closed* not Open
Access, otherwise it would be OA, not "Almost-OA") and then the
repository's automated "email eprint request" Button can be used by the
requester to trigger an automated eprint request to the author (all of this
requiring just the cut/paste of the requester's own email address plus one
keystroke from the requester to request and one keystroke from the author
to fulfill).

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open
Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing:
Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler,
Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/

But that's all on the premise that the paper has been deposited! For 80% of
papers it has not.

but increasingly I predict we will see a researcher’s personal corpus of
> work opened to the Internet. That’s OA!
>

It is indeed.

Except that it's not happening:

*How many researchers are actually doing this now, worldwide, and how
quickly is it growing? *


> Of course computer scientists have long done this on their own websites,
> but computer scientists are able to write html code and use web tools,
> whereas most researchers can’t or won’t waste the time to learn.
>

Indeed computer scientists have been doing it -- ever since they invented
Unix, UUCP and the Net in the '80s, with anonymous FTP. And indeed computer
scientists can and do do a lot more.

But have you not noticed that neither computer scientists' self-archiving
practices since the '80s nor physicists' self-archiving practices since the
'90s have generalized to other disciplines in the 20-30 years that they
have been available  in principle?

That's why we need the mandates!


> The new generation of apps such as Mendeley that collect data make this as
> easy as creating a Facebook page, and as I said, it is simply
> electronicizing what they already do, better, simpler, and cheaper.
>

And now, Arthur, it's time for you to do the stats and provide the data to
support your hypothesis and its predictions: *How quickly are these apps
being taken up for the purposes you describe, overall, and discipline by
discipline, year by year?*

To make your data comparable with the growth data for Gold OA, unmandated
Green OA and mandated Green OA, it will need to be calculated as the
percentage of yearly peer-reviewed paper output made freely accessible
online by the new means you describe, for each discipline, and overall.

It is not logically possible that there are some remarkable growth curves
for Titanium OA burgeoning as we speak -- but I hope you agree that this is
an empirical question, requiring some supporting evidence, before we are
persuaded to divert efforts to promote Green OA mandates that have been
shown to work fast, toward promoting the use of applications that have not.

There is no ‘volunteering’, Stevan. The researchers just keep on doing what
> they’ve always done, but optimize it a bit by using better tools that
> become available.
>

The tool use and optimizing is voluntary, not mandatory. So the empirical
question that has to be asked and answered remains:* What is the evidence
that this "optimizing" is actually generating OA, and what do the growth
curves look like (compared to the current alternatives).*


> I remain optimistic. Unfortunately I cannot point to big major gains to
> match where the Gold Road and the Green Road have reached, but then you
> know me also as a person with sensitive antennae for small signals of
> scholarly revolutions... It is early days yet.
>

No, Arthur, it's not early days. It's extremely *late* days, insofar as OA
is concerned. This is not the time to keep waiting, yet again, to see how
well some new piece of technology will do in generating OA.

It is the time to promote, use and apply the one tested measure that we
know works, rapidly and surely, if only it is adopted.

And that measure is to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

Stevan Harnad

**

*From:* goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] *On
Behalf Of *Stevan Harnad
*Sent:* Monday, 19 December 2011 1:10 PM
*To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
*Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Bold predictions for 2012****

** **

My friend and comrade-at-arms, the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur
Sale, finds that Gold OA publishing is growing too slowly. (He's right.)****

** **

Arthur also finds that both Green OA self-archiving, and Green OA
self-archiving mandates (ID/OA) are growing too slowly. (He's right.)****

** **

Arthur predicts that more and more researchers will spontaneously begin to
use enhanced, interoperable, interactive electronic resources (much the way
they now already use word-processing, email and the web instead of typing
and paper) so that the writing, storing and record-keeping of their own
articles, and exchanging them with one another, will become so rich and
interdigitated and natural that it will be functionally equivalent to
having deposited them in an institutional OA repository, free for all.****

** **

He calls this the "Titanium Road" to OA (though it sounds rather like a
technologically supercharged version of the Green Road to me!).****

** **

And surely he is right that something along those lines is as optimal and
inevitable as OA itself.****

** **

The question is: Will its use grow any faster, of its own accord, than Gold
or Green OA have done?****

** **

Arthur's betting that it will -- and I of course wish he were right!****

** **

But after 20 years, I have given up completely on researcher voluntarism,
even when it is overwhelmingly in their own best interests. ****

** **

It was voluntarism that I assumed would bring us universal OA "virtually
overnight" way back in 1994.****

** **

Technology has been doing nothing but making it easier and easier, and more
and more rewarding, for researchers to provide OA, year upon year, ever
since.****

** **

Yet the ever simpler and more powerful technology has never succeeded in
inducing researchers -- or, rather, has not induced anywhere near enough
researchers (for it has always induced some of them) -- to make their work
OA in anywhere near sufficient numbers to reach that fabled OA "tipping
point" that everyone keeps talking about year upon year.****

** **

So I will make no predictions for 2012, except to say that if it's a
pipe-dream that voluntarism will ever kick in among researchers of its own
accord, there is still the hope that their funders and institutions will
come to their senses and make OA compulsory, by mandating it, as a
condition for being employed and paid to conduct and report research in the
online era -- which ought long ago to have become the OA era.****

** **

It is now a matter of tried, tested and demonstrated empirical -- and hence
historical --  fact that OA mandates, if adopted, *do* accelerate the
growth of OA for the research output of the funder or institution that
mandated it -- soon approaching 100%, when it's the optimal mandate (ID/OA,
Liege model, as the sole mechanism of submission for research performance
assessment).****

** **

So the open empirical question now is whether adopting OA mandates will
succeed in kicking in among researchers' funders and institutions in
sufficient numbers -- in the way that providing OA spontaneously
*failed*to do among researchers themselves.
****

** **

Fortunately, the number of funders and institutions worldwide that need to
be convinced of the benefits of mandating OA is an order of magnitude
smaller than the number of researchers that need to provide OA.****

** **

And a number of sizeable mandating initiatives among funders at the
national level have already successfully led to mandate adoption (notably
among all the major national funders in the UK, and some at the EU level:
see ROAMAP), with the biggest of all (COMPETES) now under deliberation in
the US.****

** **

And at the global institutional level, there is now Bernard Rentier's and
Alma Swan's EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), established to help guide the
universal providers of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines --
namely,  universities and research institutions -- in designing OA policies
worldwide.****

** **

So whereas there is no basis for crowing about "tipping points," there is
reason to hope that we may not have to keep waiting for technology to put
us over the top spontaneously via Arthur's "Titanium Road" -- though
technology's help in providing OA and enhancing its benefits is always
welcome (and being actively incorporated into the EPrints and DSpace
repository software as well as into the implementation of OA mandates
almost as fast as it is developed).****

** **

Stevan Harnad****

Superannuated Archivangelist****

** **

** **

On 2011-12-18, at 4:12 PM, Arthur Sale wrote:****



****

Richard, you asked what we’d like to see in 2012.****

 ****

I’d like to see more open access journals, and higher prestige attached to
those that already exist.  Who wouldn’t?  I’d also like to see more ID/OA
mandated institutional repositories. Again who wouldn’t?  But I don’t see
either strategy as taking Open Access to the tipping point where a
scholarly revolution becomes unstoppable. Why? Because both strategies are
too cerebral, too argumentative, too technological, and they require at
present unnatural actions on the part of researchers.****

 ****

What I want to predict is a growing number of researchers doing completely
natural things that have always been in their repertoire of work, for
example like keeping a lifetime record of their publications and ephemera.
It used to be a collection of paper, but the social media tools like
Mendeley now allow this to be electronic, and like the silent transition
from typewriters to the admittedly superior word processing software, I
predict we will see a silent transition to online in-the-cloud corpus
collections. Making this open access is technologically trivial, and I have
named this the *Titanium Road to open access*: light-weight, strong, robust
and recognises what people actually do.****

 ****

If I can make another prediction, I think that 2012 might just be the year
that we begin to question the copyright position of articles. Despite legal
transfer of copyright (sometimes) most publishers pay only lip-service to
their ‘ownership’ and carry out minimal due diligence in their ‘purchase’
in return for services, and researchers respond with total indifference by
dispensing copies of the Version-of-Record as they see fit. Never a week
goes by when I do not see someone post to a list “Can anyone send me a copy
of Xxx by Yyy in journal Zzz?” and it appears they almost always are
satisfied by their later posts of effusive thanks. The law in respect of
scholarly articles has to change, and this might be the year that we begin
to see cracks open up.****

 ****

Finally, let me make my last prediction – that 2012 might see us begin to
address the issue of China, and the language barriers that look like being
a major part of the OA spectrum in this decade (2011-2020). The
English-speaking world and the European language speaking world have been
happy to live with English as the *lingua franca* (what a strange
misnomer!), but the Asian-speaking world is not likely to be so
accommodating. We shall have to begin to treat open access as a matter
involving automatic translation, at first maybe just for metadata, but
later for the whole article.****

 ****

Richard, you said you’d like to see short posts dominate this list, so I’ve
been brief to the point of encryption. I am happy to expand on any of the
previous four paragraphs, recognising that some of them are separable
issues. I hope I have been controversial enough to get some responses.****

 ****

Arthur Sale****

University of Tasmania, Australia****

 ****
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20111220/53612648/attachment-0001.html