[GOAL] Re: What is Green Open Access and how is it practised? Some questions

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 3:43 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> If we are being pragmatic, it is necessary to know the facts on which we
> base our strategy.
>
> I will publicly admit that I do not understand the goals of "Green Open
> Access".
>
>  I would like to ask a set of (hopefully simple) factual questions about
> Green. Please humour me by only answering the questions. I may have wrong
> assumptions - that why I am asking.
>
> 1 does Green OA require the archival of complete published fulltext?
>     [My assumption is YES]

Yes, the author's refereed final draft or higher.

> 2 does Green OA depend on publishers agreeing to authors self-archiving
> their manuscripts?
>     [My assumption is YES]

No. It depends on authors self-archiving their manuscripts.

> 3 is there any "official organization" that *formally* negotiates Green OA
> with publishers?
>     [My assumption is NO]

No. But the majority of journals (and almost all the top ones) already
endorse immediate Green OA.

> 4 what percentage of publishers currently forbid Green OA as defined in Q1?
>     [My assumption is about 40%]

About 35% of journals, about 40% of publishers.

> 5 How many institutions do Green OA mandates potentially apply to?
>     [I estimate between 1000 and 10000]

All research institutions (universities and research institutes)
worldwide, which is presumably at least as many as the higher
figure...

> 6 Is there one or more global organization *formally* coordinating these
> institutions?
>     [I suspect NO]

No. They are an anarchic network, like the Web. (But the repositories
are at least OAI-interoperable.)

> 7 What proportion of publications come from "Universities" or other
> organizations that potentially support self-archiving infrastructure?
>     [I guess about 80%. Publications from industry, research institutions,
> hospitals, field stations, etc. should NOT be dismissed as irrelevant or
> substandard.]

Don't know. Preumably depends on the discipline.

Les Carr's and my student, Jiadi Yao, has some limited data on the
proportion of university, research institute and corporate research in
some fields. I will ask him to post. (I agree that refereed research
from all sources is relevant, and the standard depends on the
peer-review standards of the journal that accepts it.)

> 8. How many institutions currently offer Green OA?
>     [I think Peter Suber recently suggested about 1500 have repos].

ROAR has the current figures for repositories. (But most are
unmandated, and hence only contain a small percentage of the
full-texts of the institution's total annual refereed research
output.)

> 9 what is the current full economic cost of a self-archived manuscript in a
> (a) UK University? (b) Elsewhere?
>     [see below]

Negligibly small, per paper. And would be even smaller if the
repositories were mandated, hence full, rather than unmandated, and
near empty.

> 10. Is there any agreed mechanism for (a) humans (b) machines to tell that
> an object in a repo is a Green manuscript?
>     [I assume MAYBE for (a) and NO for (b)]

A human can certainly tell, by inspection. No mechanism for machines
yet, as far as I know (though it's feasible). But as long as the
percentage OA is a sparse as it is, it's hardly urgent to develop such
a mechanism. What's urgent is to mandate deposit.

> 11. Is there any SIMPLE way of finding all Green manuscripts across all
> repos?  [I assume NO.]

Not yet. Nor is it urgent, while OA content is so sparse. But it's
feasible. The much more urgent priority is mandating deposit of the
content.

> 12. How is the compliance of authors in depositing Green OA measured? By
> whom? [I assume this has to be done by an institution and this requires them
> to (a) know how many publications have been published by "their staff" and
> (b) know how many are in the repo. I assume it is the aggregation of these
> figures that gives the "20%" green figure.

Most institutions are not systematically measuring this yet, but
samples have been tested webwide (and not just for repositories, but
also authors' websites) and 20% seems to be a good ballpark figure.

Mandated repositories are more likely to measure annual deposit rate,
and effectively implemented mandates (like Southampton ECS, QUT, Minho
and Liege) capture over 70% of their annual refereed research output.

> 13 How many institutions know and publish metrics of Green deposition
> including a percentage of the possible?.

For the vast majority of institutions that lack mandates, this
percentage would not be very useful. Yassine Gargouri is doing %OA
analyses for the institutions with effective mandates, and comparing
them with weak and no mandates.

> 14. The goal of Green OA is, as I understand it, for all Universities [sic]
> to put copies of all their peer-reviewed publications into a professionally
> supported Institutional repository. YES/NO

All research institutions, which includes universities, research
institutes and corporate R&D centres.

> 15. Can Green OA deliver 100% of the scholarly literature [sic]?
>   [I assume NO].

Yes, if all institutions and funders mandate Green OA.

>       If not what is a figure that proponents would feel represented a major
> positive outcome ("success")?

If all institutions and funders adopt (effective) Green OA mandates,
close to 100% of refereed research would be OA. That's the only
outcome worth aiming for.

> [*] I think PeterS suggested about 1.5-5 FTEs per IR. Assume 2, and cost
> each at 100K USD Full economic costs. I trawled UK Universities and found
> that they had between 500 and 10000 items. Not all of these are final
> manuscripts - some are theses (although these are so heterogeneously
> archived it's almost impossible to know) and some are other artifacts.
> Assume 1000 deposits per year (and I think that is optimistic) and you get
> over 100USD per manuscript, not including researcher time. I don't think
> that this reduces dramatically by volume as many manuscripts require
> assistance from the repo staff.

Repositories are created and used for other purposes than OA. But even
if they were just for OA, the cost per paper for an unmandated
repository is uninformative, except to show that a repository is not
worth much unless deposit is mandated.

For a repository that is capturing 100% of its annual research output,
the cost per paper deposited is negligibly small.

Stevan Harnad